Lyve Mobile Meets Multi-University Data Backup Transfer Needs

RWTH Aachen University (www.rwth-aachen.de) was founded in 1870 in Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, and is now one of the top German universities. As of the winter 2023-24 semester, the university had 45,284 enrolled students pursuing 173 courses of study. Among that total were 14,437 students from 141 countries. For the same timeframe, the staff included 572 professors, 6,354 other academic staff, 3,001 non-faculty staff, and 438 trainees.

RWTH Aachen University is project lead and a member service provider—along with the University of Bielefeld and the University of Duisburg-Essen—in a data backup consortium known as Datensicherung.nrw (https://datensicherung.dh.nrw/en/) (in English this translates to Backup for the universities in NRW [North Rhine-Westphalia]). The consortium’s aim is to “enable the participating higher education institutions to further advance digitalization through scalable services to ensure data persistence and availability.” There are 37 state universities (universities, technical universities, universities of applied sciences, and colleges of art and music) in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and currently 29 of them are members of the Datensicherung.nrw group.

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The three service provider universities, including RWTH Aachen, currently utilize a Commvault backup infrastructure (Seagate has multiple technology integrations with Commvault) for their data backups, as well as the data backups of other connected NRW universities.  The organization is aware that catastrophic events—like a fire on campus, severe storm, or malware-inflicted cyberattacks—can cause significant data losses, which is why having “a structurally, technically, and spatially separate backup copy” is crucial. Believing the previous practice of university internal data backup is unsustainable,” the group set out to establish a cross-university data backup system in and for NRW. As proponents of a solid backup strategy, the consortium understands the importance of multiple copies of data on multiple media in multiple locations.

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“Dependency on data and IT is growing,” said Dr. Thomas Eifert, chief technology officer at RWTH Aachen University’s IT center. “And the requirements for a suitable backup or the ability to recover from data loss are getting more complex.” 

This level of complexity is evident for smaller universities, according to Eifert, “but even big universities can lack the resources to accommodate all these requirements.” Plus, a consortium member’s physical size doesn’t always equal its amount of data backup.

"The universities are very different,” Eifert said, “and with the subjects they focus on come different amounts of data. There has been a significant shift. In the past, the technically oriented universities had most of the data. Currently, we see the music and arts produce much more digitalized data.”

Now, regardless of physical size or amount of data to be stored, each member of the Datensicherung.nrw consortium has shared storage via the three service provider universities.

"That’s where the main idea started...let’s consolidate backups since it’s a service that can be scaled easily,” Eifert explained. Service centers at three main universities serve all the other state schools, providing up-to-date backup and recovery services.

A joining member of the consortium must go through an initial onboarding process, where each university’s own firewall, identity system, and outbound network connectivity are tested. In some instances, the existing network connectivity might be adequate for data transfer in an acceptable amount of time, but for others, a quicker option was needed. Eifert noted that in these cases, the transfer data capacity might be high, but the latency was bad.

“When we came across universities with a poor outbound connection,” Eifert said, “we considered shipping disks. The first thought was, ‘Let’s buy some disks and have them ready.’” It quickly became obvious that relying on this approach wouldn’t be economical. Plus, the schools would need to handle disk transportation, which is not a service they know. Plus, the disks bought to have on hand aren’t the proper kind to transport on a regular basis.

When network transfer speeds presented a roadblock, RWTH Aachen University and the Datensicherung.nrw group looked for a way to deliver large amounts of consortium members’ backup data to the three service provider universities. Soon after concluding that in those cases, physical shipment was the best course of action, they learned about Seagate Lyve™ Mobile data transfer as a service.

“The Lyve Mobile data transfer service is part of the consortium onboarding process,” Eifert said. Once a university decides to participate, the group checks the new member’s firewall process integration requirements to confirm their identity system can deliver the required information. At the same time, they compare the amount of data and the outbound network connectivity, estimating how long the data transfer will take via their network and compare that to the data transfer service timing to see if there’s a significant advantage to using the latter.

According to Eifert, about half of the North Rhine-Westphalia state universities in the consortium that have completed the onboard process have used Lyve Mobile. The biggest initial data transfer was in the 300TB range and now, across the network, they add about 140TB every night. Consortium staff continue discussions with the remaining universities considering joining.

Lyve Mobile has helped Datensicherung.nrw and RWTH Aachen University with transferring data to central locations for secure backup. Now they’re considering its use to bolster their disaster recovery strategy.

“We have this nice incremental backup running every day,” Eifert said. “But what happens in the case of a disaster? How do we get the same amount of data back to the university that needs it in case everything has been destroyed or corrupted?”

The consortium is preparing the process to load the Lyve Mobile system with the universities’ essential data to bring them back to service, and be able to ship this data back to them.

Eifert explained the group’s disaster recovery strategy employing Lyve Mobile would differ from the current initial onboarding and continuing centralized backup strategy.

“With onboarding, there is the choice whether we use data transfer as a service (Lyve Mobile) or allow it more time and complete via wire (by network connection). But, on the recovery side, there is no question. It must be done within days.”

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