CERN Optimizes Research and Administrative Application Management, Reduces IT Effort through Virtualization
 
 

CERN Optimizes Research and Administrative Application Management, Reduces IT Effort through Virtualization

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CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centers for scientific research. Founded in 1954 and located near Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border, CERN was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 20 member states. The organization leverages the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study fundamental particles and discover what the universe is made of and how it works.

CERN has a 30-year long relationship with Oracle and makes extensive use of Oracle software and hardware technologies to support mission critical applications in most of the administrative and technical activities within the organization.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from CERN

  • "We chose Oracle WebLogic Server 11g and Oracle VM because they enable us to make better use of our physical and virtual resources, covering all the needs of our applications with better efficiency, less risk and an improved quality of service. Oracle WebLogic Server easily integrates with the other Oracle products we have at CERN and provides a consistent and stable platform for deploying numerous applications in a large scale environment." – Carlos Garcia Fernandez, Computer Scientist, CERN

  • Update CERN’s application middleware environment with a more reliable and stable platform, based on the latest Java technologies to support its worldwide scientific community
  • Run a variety of scientific and administrative applications for a heterogeneous user community and virtualized environments
  • Maximize hardware and management resources
  • Ensure the new control environment maintains high performance even with multiple application server instances running simultaneously on the same hardware
  • Ensure integration with CERN’s extremely large fabric management system to automate system deployments

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Worked with Oracle to deploy Oracle WebLogic Server 11g and Oracle VM to migrate CERN’s application for resource and research budget administration, known as APT (activity planning tool), to the new environment
  • Used several optimization capabilities, such as VM fast search and memory ballooning, to deploy rapidly in production databases and application servers
  • Deployed Oracle WebLogic Server 11g to provide stable performance and eliminate downtime for an application supporting the coordination of activities in the large hadron collider tunnel
  • Simplified and accelerated the deployment of virtual machines with higher hardware and management resource usage to reduce administrative effort
  • Leveraged enhanced virtualization capabilities to reach 5% performance improvement compared with the physical environment, based on CERN testing
  • Integrated Oracle VM into the extremely large fabric management system, which enabled automated server installation and configuration within 20 minutes

Resources