Operation and Performance of the LHCb experiment

The LHCb experiment collected 37.7 pb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity during the first year of proton collisions at 7 TeV centre of mass energy at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This was achieved by operating the detector at almost its designed instantaneous luminosity, with an overall operational efficiency of over 90%. In this paper, aspects of the operation of LHCb and some global performance results from the first year of data taking are reviewed. Particular attention is given to the running conditions in 2010, which were driven by the outstanding commissioning of the LHC accelerator, and to the trigger strategy, whose flexibility allowed the LHCb experiment to explore its physics potential while accumulating luminosity. The LHCb experiment proved during the first year of running to be at the forefront of physics discoveries at CERN, complementing well the physics results from the General Purpose Detectors ATLAS and CMS at the LHC.