Central storage infrastructure of the University of Hamburg - ZSI

The Central storage infrastructure (ZSI) is a powerful, fail-safe, and highly scalable infrastructure component of the university's IT system for providing central disk storage.

Since its establishment in early 2010, the ZSI has been widely and intensively used by the university's faculties and institutions as a reliable and secure storage cloud. It is used both indirectly via various RRZ services, such as file services or mail, and via direct access at the block level.

The ZSI hosts a wide variety of data types. Thanks to the ZSI's integrated virtualization layer, extensive image, audio, and video files are managed just as effectively as databases and office documents. The size of the storage areas used ranges from a few gigabytes to several terabytes.

If you are interested in using the ZSI, please write to us at rrz-serviceline(at)uni-hamburg.de( rrz-serviceline"AT"uni-hamburg.de).

From a technical perspective, ZSI consists of a disk storage pool with three different storage classes, a storage virtualization layer, and a storage network based on Fibre Channel, also known as a Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (FC-SAN). It is integrated into the university's IT landscape and is therefore available via the university's entire communication network.

Today, the ZSI provides central disk storage for a large part of the RRZ's systems and services and other systems on campus. The number of integrated systems is constantly increasing, and the provisioned storage capacity is growing steadily. In line with the university's ever-growing requirements, the ZSI is expanding continuously and in line with demand. It has already been expanded several times in small steps.