CERN selects T-Systems and Huawei for European Hybrid Cloud to Serve 10 leading public research organizations

Lyon, France, November 23, 2016: T-Systems has been awarded a frame 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. T-Systems, supported by its technology partner Huawei, will develop a solution based on its Open Telekom Cloud public cloud service launched in March 2016 and which currently supports workloads from various leading enterprises, SMEs and public sector organizations.

This €5.3 million joint PCP tender, led by CERN, will establish a European hybrid cloud platform designed to 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. A total of 28 multinational companies, SMEs and public research organizations from 12 countries submitted bids during the summer. The PCP will start with a design phase where the four selected consortia will compete to go through to the prototyping phase.

CERN is operating one of the world's largest OpenStack private clouds with more than 7,000 servers and 190,000 cores. 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 Cloud, operated by T-Systems and technology partner 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 three-month pilot. “Following the extensive tests, it has become apparent, that Open Telekom Cloud can support the high-performance and data-intensive workloads required”, said Andreas Falkner, Vice President, Open Telekom Cloud, Digital Division at T-Systems.

In addition to CERN, the following research organizations are part of the joint PCP and 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

This is part of the HNSciCloud project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme.