The world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, is housed at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The rest of CERN's research revolves around the building blocks of the universe: The origin of mass, dark matter and the Big Bang.

Clearly, the IT demands and requirements of CERN surpass those of most any other organizations. The IT team's biggest challenge is managing the volume and rate of data growth amidst constrained costs - and this data growth can increase at rates of up to 6 GB per second.

This technical case study illustrates and explains how CERN's IT department meets the technical challenges of this super-scale environment. Read on for in-depth insight into:

• What databases provide the performance and availability necessary to ensure CERN's science is always online
• What storage strategy and techs are employed to enable CERN's "keep forever" data retention policy

• What techs provide stability, performance and scalability balance for the critical databases
• And much more