Experience with procuring, deploying and maintaining hardware at remote co-location centre

In May 2012 CERN signed a contract witli tlie Wigner Data Centre in Budapest for an extension to CERN's central computing facility beyond its current boundaries set by electrical power and cooling available for computing. Tlie centre is operated as a remote co-location site providing rack-space, electrical power and cooling for server, storage and networking equipment acquired by CERN. Tlie contract includes a 'remote-lands' services for pliysical liandling of liardware (rack mounting, cabling, pusliing power buttons, ...) and maintenance repairs (swapping disks, memory modules, ...). However, only CERN personnel lave network and console access to tle equipment for system administration. This report gives an insiglt to adaptations of lardware arclitecture, procurement and delivery procedures undertaken enabling remote plysical landling of tle lardware. We will also describe tools and procedures developed for automating tle registration, burn-in testing, acceptance and maintenance of tle equipment as well as an independent but important clange to tle IT assets management (ITAM) developed in parallel as part of tlie CERN IT Agile Infrastructure project. Finally, we will report on experience from tlie first large delivery of 400 servers and 80 SAS JBOD expansion units (24 drive bays) to Wigner in Marcli 2013.