I'm Gavin McCance, I work
in the CERN IT department,
I look after the grid compute services and
the batch compute services
that we use to analyze the data from the Large
Hadron Collider experiment.
We're here at CERN with the Puppet Labs guys
today. 
So what does CERN do?
It's involved in fundamental research, 
so we have a large underground collider 
looking for new fundamental particles.
In fact, last week we discovered the Higgs
Boson, which has been searched for for the last 50
years.
So, the problem we have today,
for the last 10 years at CERN we've been
managing our compute infrastructure with our
own scripts and our own home-developed tools.
We're now in the process of
expanding our computing resources
because LHC physics requirements are
quite heavy on compute time, 
we need to buy a lot more computers, 
and we're also moving to virtualization. 
So this is increasing the dynamicness of the
environment that we're in, 
and basically our own, homegrown scripts 
are becoming a maintenance problem for us.
Six months ago we started looking outside
for open source tools to help manage our infrastructure, 
and we settled on Puppet. 
We've been having really great experiences
with Puppet, so we've been discussing with 
the Puppet Labs guys here today, 
and we're very very happy with Puppet. 
What we're doing now is in 2013, 
we're getting a new computing center, 
we're expanding our computing resources, 
and that center will be entirely Puppet-managed,
and over the next two years we'll be migrating
our production infrastructure, the computers here,
to Puppet as well. So we're really looking forward to 
working with Puppet. Thank you!
