Research Communicator
from AlphaGalileo — March 2012

Thank you for your understanding

The disastrous failures at our hosting service were something that many of us had never experienced before. Steve Puxley the CEO of our IT partners explains below the technical issues and the work that they have been doing to put all their clients back on line.

For AlphaGalileo the heartening thing was the support that we received from our user communities. One message in particular was particularly cheering. "The only other guys I would notice I missed would be the New York Times."

Well we’re back. There are some glitches to be ironed out, for example a few email servers around the Net that still haven’t updated their records and are still treating our emails as spam. But if you find something that is not working as it should please get in touch via alphagalileo@alphagalileo.org

AlphaGalileo has always striven to deliver a service that meets the needs of its users. We work hard to ask you what you want not tell you what you can have. That philosophy will continue to underpin our work.

Report on the “Black weekend” at our hosting provider

On Friday, 3rd February 2012, around 8pm, our site went offline due to a catastrophic failure of hardware within our hosting provider’s data centre environment. The root cause of this was multiple hardware failure within their central storage repository.

Our hosting provider had configured their hosting environment to deal with multiple hardware failures however because of the extent of the failures the hosting environment was not able to recover from its failed state. The hosting infrastructure was designed with multiple redundancies in mind and on all layers within the infrastructure.

Starting from the top, we have two enterprise firewalls serving the hosted environment and protecting it from nasties of the Internet. If one firewall was to fail then this will not result in the loss of connectivity to the environment. All traffic within the environment would seamlessly transfer over to the secondary non-faulty firewall. We have a cluster of two load-balancers that are both actively balancing connections to the various servers within the hosting environment, however, should one load balancer fail then the other non-faulty load-balancer would be able to handle all the traffic in the network without any loss of service.

We have four switches (two for external traffic and two for iSCSI traffic) each server has multiple connections to each switch thus allowing for a single switch on each layer to fail without any loss of connectivity. We have a cluster of four high end servers (Dell PowerEdge R710 servers with 64Gb RAM and RAID 1 OS drives) serving the Citrix Xen Virtualisation Platform running within this infrastructure. Each server has four network interfaces connecting to the four switches. There are two power supplies connected to each server with separate power feeds.

The Xenservers are in turn connected to the large SAN (Storage Area Network) with multiple large (1TB) hard disk drives (HDD). The SAN was configured with two disk volume groups; RAID5 disk volume group for virtual servers and a RAID 10 volume group for high throughput storage. In a RAID 5 configuration, there is allowance for a single disk failure and RAID 10 configuration allows for half the number of disk failures configured in that group to fail. Both RAID groups also have a hot spare drive to cater for an automatic recovery of a single disk failure therefore it would automatically take over the role of the failed hard drive and the RAID volume group will reconstruct all active data onto the hot spare, while waiting for a replacement HDD.

The SAN also have multiple protections against failures (redundancies); this also has two power supplies connecting to two separate power feeds. It also has two independent RAID controllers connecting to its disks such that should one fail then the other would take over the tasks of handling the data held within the hard drives.

Unfortunately, the incident that took place on Friday 3rd February 2012 was a result of multiple hardware failures within this SAN that resulted in the whole environment going offline. Further outages were caused when the SAN came back online but it had lost its IQN (iSCSI Qualified Name) and that also resulted in the failure of the virtualisation platform.

Our hosting continues to provide monitoring for the new hosted environment in a similar manner to the original hosted environment and looking at ways in which to further improve and upscale our services to best meet the needs of our users.

VIP Profile: Catalin Mosoia — AlphaGalileo is like an old friend

“AlphaGalileo is like an old friend who you can trust and rely on and who you enjoy meeting. You listen with pleasure to what he is saying because he always has something new to tell. Sometimes you wonder, sometimes you have to ask further question to better understand what he says. Then you might tell others and try to give them a glimpse of your joy. I remember that a couple of times, my friend did not turn up at our daily meetings, most recently just a few weeks ago. For a moment, I did not know what had happened, but then I found out that it was a temporary problem with the machine that tirelessly helps him get to the meetings with all his friends, because he has many friends; I am just one of them. After a while everything returned to normal. News releases started entering my Inbox as I was used to. That is the way I see AlphaGalileo. As a friend.”

Catalin Mosoia has a background in Mathematics and has worked as a teacher of Mathematics and Astronomy for 7 years. Later he worked as a radio journalist. Currently he writes for Scoala Edu - www.scoala.edu.ro, an online and print educational magazine, and occasionally for other publications.

Hits Parade — AlphaGalileo Top 5

Our hit parade compiles the press releases with bigger number of visits in February 2012.

1. European neanderthals were on the verge of extinction even before the arrival of modern humans — Uppsala Universitet — 25/02/2012

New findings from an international team of researchers show that most neanderthals in Europe died off around 50,000 years ago. The previously held view of a Europe populated by a stable neandertal population for hundreds of thousands of years up until modern humans arrived must therefore be revised. .

2. Wiley-Blackwell Launches Two Interdisciplinary Review Publications in Developmental and Membrane Biology — Wiley-Blackwell — 24/02/2012

Wiley-Blackwell, the scientific, technical, medical and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., has launched two new interdisciplinary review publications: WIREs Developmental Biology and WIREs Membrane Transport and Signaling. WIREs Developmental Biology will focus on how single cells and fertilized eggs produce a complex, fully patterned adult organism. WIREs Membrane Transport and Signaling will explore the regulated transport of molecules through cell membranes and the transmission of extracellular signals by cellular receptors.

3. Tecnimede pharmaceutical company and iBET together in innovative in vitro human cell models approach in neurodegenerative pathologies — iBET - Instituto de Biologia Experimental e Tecnológica — 24/02/2012

The Portuguese pharmaceutical company Tecnimede and iBET have just established a unique collaboration protocol, aiming at developing human relevant in vitro models for the research & development process. This is the largest research collaboration celebrated between iBET and one of its national industrial partners.

4. Glow and be eaten - marine bacteria use light to lure plankton and fish — Hebrew University of Jerusalem — 23/02/2012

Not all that glitters is gold. Sometimes it is just bacteria trying to get ahead in life. Many sea creatures glow with a biologically produced light. This phenomenon, known as bioluminescence, is observed, among others, in some marine bacteria which emit a steady light once they have reached a certain level of concentration (a phenomenon called “quorum sensing”) on organic particles in ocean waters.

5. Scripps Florida Team Awarded Nearly $1.5 Million to Develop Potent New HIV Inhibitors — The Scripps Research Institute — 24/02/2012

A Scripps Florida team has been awarded nearly $1.5 million by the National Institutes of Health to identify and develop novel potent inhibitors of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the cause of AIDS.

Staff Pick — Humanity’s Dark Side
— University of Bergen — 23 February 2012

A new wave of filmmakers seem to get satisfaction from making the audience turn their eyes away from the screen in disgust. How do we interpret the art cinema of the last decade? This is the theme of the recently published book «Screening the Unwatchable» (Palgrave MacMillan) by Asbjørn Grønstad from the University of Bergen (UiB). In the book, Grønstad tracks the new tradition of uncomfortable film violence from the late 1990s onwards and discusses a wave of recent films that have subverted film’s traditional pleasure principle.

You can read the full article here

Image of the Month

“Domestic consumption main contributor to Africa’s growing E-waste - UN report finds imports of waste electronics from Europe exacerbate E-waste problem in Africa” — Empa — 10 February 2012

Caption: Another way of re-using old computers: dump site at the Agbogbloshie informal scrap metal market in Accra/Ghana

The Savvy User's Corner – Create a perfect summary

Summaries are the first piece of information that journalists see in their emails so it is important to use them correctly. A summary should offer the basic information of the news item and at the same time grab the attention of the reader. Our online forms will ask you to include a summary when you send us information. Please be aware of a few things:

• Add it twice: Our online forms will ask to fill the summary at the beginning of the process but remember that you would need to include it also as the first paragraph of the main text. This way, readers would see it as part of the whole item on our website too.
• Short is better: Summaries in our online form should not have more than 120 words. This will keep our alerts short and effective. If journalists are interested in the news piece they will access easily to our website via a link. News alerts are only a brief description of what they can find.

If you have any questions about this or any other feature please do not hesitate to contact our team at alphagalileo@alphagalileo.org

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