HW & SW

The IRPI computer infrastructure is based on 82 virtual machines residing on twelve host servers, and other physical devices. Host servers are HP Proliant DL380 G7, HP Proliant DL360 G5 and HP Proliant DL180 G6 computers, equipped with EsaCore Intel ® Xeon E5649 at 2.5 GHz, QuadCore Intel ® Xeon L5420 at 2.5 GHz, Dual Core Intel ® Xeon 5130 at 2.00GHz, and with RAM between 11 GB and 48 GB. All host servers contain at least two hard drives configured in RAID1, and are connected to 2 Infortrend SAN using the iSCSI protocol.

For virtualisation we use VMware ESXi 5.0 (http://www.vmware.com/), KVM (http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page) on CentOS server and Citrix XenServer (http://www.citrix.com/products/xenserver/overview.html?ntref=prod_cat). The virtual machines are running Linux OS (Ubuntu Server and CentOS Server) and Windows Server OS (2003 Std-R2 and 2008 R2).

The virtual operating system under VMware Hypervisor runs through the VMware Virtual Center Server, a software from a single interface that allows organising an managing the system, monitoring the performances (e.g., CPU, memory, I/O to disk and network), and optimising the HW resources. The VMware VirtualCenter Server is installed on a PC P5QLD ASUS with an Intel ® E6500 processor, 4 GB of RAM, running Windows Server 2088 R2 - 64 bit. The same hardware is also used as a datastore backup for all the virtual machines.

Data Processing Center

IRPI Data Processing Center

A large number of the virtual machines is used to implement the IRPI Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), designed to disseminate geographical and thematic information on geo-hydrological hazards and risk in Italy.

Istituto di Ricerca per la Protezione Idrogeologica