T-Systems has been awarded a €5.3 million contract for a joint Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP), led by CERN, that covers the design, prototyping and pilot phase of the Helix Nebula Science Cloud. Huawei was named as technology partner. Three other consortia were also selected.
The contract covers the establishment of a European hybrid cloud platform that will support high-performance, data-intensive scientific use-cases sponsored by 10 of Europe’s leading public research organizations and co-funded by the European Commission.
CERN is operating one of the world’s largest OpenStack private clouds with more than 7,000 servers and 190,000 cores.
T-Systems said that as more and more research organizations start to use cloud services, demand is growing for dynamic capacity that can be transparently activated in a hybrid cloud. Open Telecom Telekom Cloud, operated by T-Systems and supported by Huawei, is based on the OpenStack open source architecture and facilitates the management and migration of data and resources between private and public clouds.
As part of an earlier procurement in 2016, CERN and T-Systems evaluated the capabilities of the Open Telekom Cloud in a 3-months pilot. “Following the extensive tests, it has become apparent, that Open Telekom Cloud can support the high-performance and data-intensive workloads required”, summarizes Andreas Falkner, Vice President Open Telekom Cloud from T-Systems.
Next to CERN following research organizations plan to make use of the European Hybrid Cloud:
- Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Italy
- Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), Germany
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, (CNRS), France
- Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), Germany
- SURFsara, Netherlands
- Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), United Kingdom
- European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Germany
- Institut de Física d’Altes Energies (IFAE), Spain
- European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), France
