Case Study: CERN achieves scalable, high-reliability data storage with Huawei

Huawei Makes a Big Bang at CERN

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, needed a way to store and manage rapidly growing volumes of scientific data from the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments. Its existing tape-heavy storage environment was difficult to query, complex to manage, and could not easily scale to the 300 PB of long-term capacity CERN expected to need. Huawei provided support through CERN openlab, including a Universal Distributed Storage (UDS) system.

Huawei’s UDS solution distributed data across multiple storage nodes to remove bottlenecks, support flexible expansion, and improve reliability with multi-copy and erasure-code protection. In testing, the system delivered throughput of 588.4 MB/s at 5 Gbit/s and 2,200 MB/s at 18 Gbit/s, with no data loss since installation. Huawei’s low-cost architecture using ARM processors and consumer-grade disks also helped reduce power use and OPEX while enabling highly reliable, scalable storage.

CERN