Sinus Infrastructure

CETIC’s cluster, acquired in the scope of the SINUS project, is an opportunity for businesses willing to adapt faster to new IT architecture concepts such as distributed storage, Service Oriented Architectures and Cloud Computing.

Date: 3 April 2012

About project: SINUS ⊕

Author : Stéphane Mouton

Characteristics

CETIC’s cluster is made of 16 blade servers, or nodes, split in two groups: 8 "low density" blades, each fit with 4 cores CPUs and 16Gb of RAM; while 8 other "high density" blades have, for eachone of them, dual CPU, providing 8 cores and 32Gb of RAM. The blades are interconnected through a high performance switch, also linking to a SAN (24Tb raw storage capacity) and to CETIC’s internal network. Each component is remotely manageable.

An Infrastructure for Experimentation

The cluster is a live test bed for research projects on emerging features of Cloud Computing architectures such as scalability, or dynamic supply/demand adaptation of IT resources.
To this end, the architecture of the cluster is designed to provide the following features:

Remote access: the cluster is connected to Internet through a high bandwidth link.
Virtualization: the cluster is almost exclusively used by deploying virtual machines. Direct access to physical machines is restricted to experiments on virtualization and Cloud managers.
Network security: virtual machines of each experiment are isolated from other research projects. A firewall also controls access to and from Internet.

Open to Businesses and Research Projects

The cluster allows CETIC to perform tests and to build proofs of concept for businesses. The role of the cluster is also to provide a platform for CETIC research activities, notably in the scope of the European research projects.