Cephalocon 2019

MeerKAT, inaugurated on the 13’th of July 2018 under the auspices of SARAO, is a radio telescope consisting of 64 antennas which has been built in the Northern Cape, South Africa.

In this talk, Martin will describe the hardware, software stack, deployment and operation tools used on the MeerKAT data archive.

MeerKAT currently has two Ceph clusters, one on-site at the telescope in the arid Karoo and the second larger cluster in Cape Town.

The Cape Town cluster consists out of 2640 hard drives and 55 NVMe devices. The Karoo cluster consists out 240 hard drives and 480 solid state disks.

The clusters were built by a small team of engineers and as much as possible of the deployment and operation has been automated.