CERN, a scientific research centre, has selected HP‘s networking offerings to enhance its network infrastructure performance, reliability and security to support its discoveries.

HP networking offerings are core to the HP Converged Infrastructure, which integrates servers, storage and networking into pools of interoperable resources, said the company.

The CERN’s campus network infrastructure is designed to ensure efficient communication between CERN sites.

To enhance communication between CERN sites, the centre has introduced IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6), an internet layer protocol for packet-switched networking.

In addition, the CERN’s sites in the Geneva region are now supported by HP E-series switches.

These sites house CERN’s six particle accelerators including: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) project.

HP said that the WLCG enables scientists to share, store and analyse 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data each year.

Further, CERN has selected HP E6600, E5412 and E8212 switches and HP e3500 advanced intelligent edge switches for data centre server-edge connectivity across its Geneva sites.

These open standards-based offerings ensure that CERN’s network is manageable, flexible, secure and expandable, enabling the organisation to move forward with IPv6 easily and cost-effectively.

CERN communication systems IT department group leader Jean-Michel Jouanigot said the research centre needed a reliable, secure and proven network infrastructure that could support IPv6 for faster communications and multicast capabilities for new applications.