Thomas Eifert

CTO, RWTH Aachen University

RWTH Aachen University is one of Europe’s leading institutions for science and research – with 260 institutes in nine faculties, 45,000 students enrolled in over 150 academic programmes, and over 9,000 international students from 120 different countries.

Supernova Award Category: 
Digital Safety, Governance, Privacy, and Cybersecurity
The Problem: 

The German State of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) is a leading industrial region in Germany looking to improve and streamline services across the higher education sector, and in turn provide a well-trained and skilled workforce to their prospering economy. After the state decided to establish a consolidated offering for all universities, they needed a solution to how they could consolidate digital infrastructure services – including backup and recovery – to increase efficiency across public higher education facilities.

The Solution: 

As one of Germany's Universities of Excellence, RWTH Aachen University was leading the effort to create a standardized backup and recovery service. While RWTH was evaluating a wide range of vendors and solutions, they knew that a key priority for them was flexible compatibility between storage infrastructure and backup software, and a solution that could handle the scale and features they needed. After two separate public tender processes for the backup software and backup infrastructure solutions, RWTH ended up partnering with Hitachi Vantara. With technical guidance from the Hitachi Vantara team, RWTH was able to set up the building blocks for their new environment that prioritizes resiliency with built-in data integrity monitoring and automated failover capabilities.

The Results: 

Before implementing these solutions, RWTH only offered basic file backups and relied on manual working or custom scripts to back up important applications. Now, the RWTH service offers fully integrated, smarter application-aware backups for software such as Microsoft Exchange, Oracle Database or SAP ERP, which improve backup speed and ensure data consistency. This plays a key role in strengthening cybersecurity and minimizing the impact of security threats and ransomware attacks.

Metrics: 
  • 7,000 active backups – 250 IT teams can now focus on optimizing operations instead of managing backups.
  • A user successfully restored a 10 TB departmental server after a cyberattack – everything went smoothly, and they were back online well before lunch the same day.
  • 56 PB total storage capacity – providing geo-redundant backup capacity across six clusters with 72 nodes.
The Technology: 

RWTH deployed the distributed object storage solution Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) across six data centers of RWTH Aachen to serve as a backup target. The IT team installed a geo-redundant configuration with six clusters, each with 12 nodes and a total capacity of 56 PB.

Additional features/technology used include:

  • HCP’s Geo Erasure Coding feature
  •  Commvault Backup & Recovery software, in collaboration with HCP
Disruptive Factor: 

RWTH and Hitachi Vantara are playing a central role in NRW’s drive to increase cost-efficiency and digitization in the education sector.  With their implementation of Hitachi solutions, RWTH was able to successfully launch Datensicherung.NRW, a state-wide service by NRW universities for NRW universities. This is a cornerstone of the state’s cyber resiliency strategy, and Hitachi solutions have minimized the effects of security threats and attacks to their digital infrastructure.

Shining Moment: 

RWTH is not done with their plans for innovation. In the future, they plan to expand the backup service beyond just university servers to cover staff desktops as well. Following their great collaboration, RWTH is excited to see where they can take this as Hitachi Vantara participates in another public tender for a new research data archive.

About RWTH Aachen University

RWTH Aachen University is a public research university located in Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With more than 47,000 students enrolled in 144 study programs, it is the largest technical university in Germany. RWTH Aachen University exploits strong research networks and the intellectual curiosity of its staff to address bold scientific questions, transfer forefront knowledge and drive innovative discoveries that impact global challenges.