Computing Service

The LNF Computing Service deals with the configuration and administration of the data transmission network, the IT infrastructure and the computing resources of LNF and AC (Central Administration). Furthermore, it also plays an important role for INFN by managing some crucial IT services, relevant at national level. In detail, the Computing Service manages:

• The network infrastructure: the structured cabling system, both copper and optic fiber, the Local Area Network equipment (Layer 2 and Layer 3 switches), the wireless network equipment, the Wide Area Network connections and access routers, information security management devices;
• The following Storage infrastructure and Mass Storage resources: Storage Area Network, Network Attached Storage, Distributed File System (Andrew File System), Tivoli Storage Manager to manage backup and archiving services through the magnetic tape libraries;
• A system virtualization infrastructure: a set of clusters of machines based on Intel processor, used to manage several virtualization environments;
• A set of infrastructure services for ensuring the network functionalities: the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and the Domain Name System servers, security servers (Log and Audit recording, monitoring system), virtual servers to manage the national infrastructure of authentication and authorization, etc.;
• A set of critical and virtualized IT services: the Mail system (namely mail relays, inbox server, webmail, Antivirus and Antispam), the Database Servers (Oracle and MySQL), the web and streaming servers, the printing servers, etc.;
• The scientific computing resources: some experiment linux farms, the Windows domain, Linux virtual systems for general user access;
• Computing management resources for ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning): the Information System for staff management and payroll, for documents and IT protocol administration;
• The web hosting services for INFN, AC and LNF: web servers and portals, database and application servers;
• The Disaster Recovery of services and data relevant or critical for INFN: the protection of the Institute’s applications and business data.

The Computing Service actively participates to the development of the !CHAOS project (aimed to the realization of a prototype of Control as a Service open platform, suited for a large number of applications in science, industry and society); and more in detail both to the development of the software and of the common framework, and to the implementation of a cloud infrastructure aimed to deploy IT resources based on IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) models.