Dealing with petabytes of heterogeneous data and different workflows while having only a few people on the team. The case of the German Climate Computing Center.
FishOS aims to provide effective and unified data management tools to organizations of any size. Our client DKRZ (Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum) is a non-profit company that specializes in high performance computing (HPC) for climate research. They had implemented their own cloud solution based on OpenStack and decided to incorporate Sardina to get additional support. Spoiler alert: they are extremely satisfied with the results.
DKRZ is a central service center for German climate and earth system research. Its high-performance computers, data storage, and services form the central research infrastructure for simulation-based climate science in Germany.
Although the company has been using OpenStack for some time, updating it to the next major version, along with Ceph, posed a significant challenge. During that period, the client’s technical team encountered numerous issues with its own cloud solution.
After several years of intense effort, the team decided to enhance their cloud management capabilities with improved functionality and stability to achieve better results.
“We had our own cloud solution up and running. There was a point where we made a decision to use someone to help us. Then Sardina Systems came into play.”
Dirk Welsch, System administrator at DKRZ
As a provider of computing power, data storage capacity, and technical support for models and simulations in climate research, DKRZ offers its scientific users an extensive portfolio of tailor-made services. It maintains and develops application software relevant to climate research and supports its users in matters of data processing. Given the vast amount of data involved, DKRZ faces significant challenges in keeping everything up and running and upgraded.
One of the major challenges was managing this large amount of data to the cloud with a small team on board.
“We are dealing with petabytes of data, i. e., thousands of terabytes. Therefore, the FishOS cloud management infrastructure helped us optimize our work.”
Dirk Welsch, System administrator at DKRZ
FishOS by Sardina Systems is a unified and flexible software that covers all three phases of the cloud infrastructure lifecycle: deployment, operation, and upgrade. One of the many reasons to choose Fish OS is its simplicity of migration and maintenance without additional staff. Another reason was that Fish OS sits on top of plain-vanilla OpenStack inhibiting vendor-locking as is the case with many other solutions. This is what DKRZ was able to benefit from.
The next crucial factor for DKRZ was quick and unlimited support for troubleshooting and optimized operations.
“It is very important for us because we have a lot of different systems running in our data center, and we are not able to be experts in everything. You can do that by yourself, but we do not always have the time and resources.”
Dirk Welsch, System administrator at DKRZ
Sardina Systems Support goes beyond a classic technical support concept. We do not only provide instant help when a problem occurs, but also ensure to constantly maintain communication and share our knowledge to give all the necessary tools and skills to operate enterprise cloud environments managed by FishOS.
“Our cooperation is very good! I like the people in Sardina Systems, and I see that technical experts are ready to explain the root cause of an issue, if operational errors emerge. I would say it is not only support, but it is also helping us understand and solve all emerging problems ourselves.”
Dirk Welsch, System administrator at DKRZ
The distinctive feature of Sardina Systems’ support service is its focus on educating and enhancing clients’ knowledge of OpenStack. Rather than simply aiming to quickly resolve cases, we follow a multi-step approach that includes prompt troubleshooting, providing detailed feedback to the client, and engaging in Q&A sessions.