UK SBS PR17148 CEPH Storage Servers for Physics Data Processing at the RAL Tier-1

AWARDED FOLLOWING A CALL OFF COMPETITION UNDER THE SERVERS, STORAGE & SOLUTIONS NATIONAL AGREEMENT (SSSNA) Lot 3B (2016/S 061-103632) The STFC Scientific Computing Department provides a national computing facility (The Tier-1 Service) at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) for the UK particle physics GRID computing project GridPP (http://www.gridpp.ac.uk). The Tier-1 has a large installation of PC Linux storage servers hosting approximately 15PB of physics data, using mainly SATA disks arrays. STFC seeked an affordable commodity storage solution to augment the existing storage provision and meet the needs of the GridPP project. A detailed specification is provided below.