Hitachi Vantara has developed a backup and recovery solution for the 40-plus universities in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) in Germany.
Together with the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) Aachen University, Hitachi Vantara has provided digital infrastructure which, we’re told, enhances data resilience, protects against future threats, and reduces overall costs and power consumption.
RWTH Aachen University itself experienced first hand disaster in 2016, when a massive fire destroyed a building on the campus that also housed one of its decentralized datacenters.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, the digitalization of the universities is being accelerated to improve efficiency and security. A key element of this process is the consolidation of digital infrastructure services, such as backup and recovery. In the past, each university, faculty, and institute developed and operated its own backup and recovery processes and solutions.
To increase productivity, cost efficiency, and protection against cyber threats such as ransomware, the universities of the state cooperatively created a consolidated offering for all universities under the Datensicherung.NRW project.
The project establishes a “unique” model for delivering IT services at scale and provides standardized services for all universities. The high-performance and scalable system, based on the object storage solution, Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), now backs up around 7,000 systems. This includes around 4,500 at RWTH, and a further 2,500 from other universities and colleges.
The current storage capacity is 56PB. The project represents “significant progress” in the digitalization of the university infrastructure in NRW, said Hitachi, and “sets new standards” in the use of modern storage technologies for backing up and restoring university data.
“Data is the lifeblood of a university, and scientific data is invaluable. At the same time, we cannot completely lock up our systems like a commercial business,” said Matthias Müller, head of the IT Center at RWTH Aachen University. “This service is now a cornerstone of the state’s cyber resiliency strategy. By delivering reliable, immutable backups as-a-service, our Hitachi solution plays a key role in strengthening cyber security and minimizing the impact of security threats.”
RWTH Aachen University implemented the HCP distributed object storage system in six university datacenters as a backup target. The geo-redundant configuration of the distributed object storage solution – with 72 nodes and a total 56PB of storage capacity – uses geo-erasure coding to guarantee data integrity and resilience across multiple locations.
“Even we don’t build a geo-redundant data backup of this size every day. RWTH has chosen our storage technology as the basis for the Datensicherung.NRW project, and is proof there are hardly any limits to distributed data backup, even in complex requirements,” said Petra-Maria Grohs, managing director of Germany at Hitachi Vantara.
