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Research Information Technology Infrastructure

Research Information Technology Infrastructure

One of the core elements enabling research, infrastructure and transfer activities is the constant further development of the central IT services in the building complex and all affiliated institutions of the museum. The IT Services unit is responsible for all aspects of the IT infrastructure.
National and international cooperation in research, infrastructure, transfer and administration is no longer possible without a fail-safe IT infrastructure. One of the most important aspects of the IT research infrastructure is the support of digital transformation and the continuous digitisation of the collection. The IT service unit consistently updates, secures and expands the data storage and ensures the long-term preservation of the digitised objects as a crucial strategic building block for  the Museum´s future. In order to ensure the continuous provision of an IT research infrastructure and data security, the experts of the IT service unit are involved in the construction planning.

Helpdesk & System Administration

This unit coordinates and manages 820 PCs and (currently) 450 active user profiles to ensure the basic function of Museum's activities. In addition, the management of workstation machines and laboratory equipment, laptops, telephones, printers and networks for terminal equipment are grouped here.

Systems & Software

With the virtualisation of about 98 % of all essential IT services in its own server rooms and the switch to Microsoft Hyper-V fail-over cluster, the Museum can independently and safely administer and host all of its own data. All storage components are used to secure the data and storage network.

Data and Storage Network & Data Storage

To secure its data- and storage network, all storage components within the fibre channel structure are integrated, so that redundant paths are used, performance load is distributed and the entire data stream is separated from other network activity. The Museum currently operates five storage controllers with a total capacity of 1.5PB (Peta Byte). Each of these controllers is redundant and failsafe. Disk pools can be used to compensate for potential failure of individual hard disks over a longer period of time.
Virtualized file servers within the IT infrastructure are redundantly available for the persistent storage of unstructured scientific mass data. These systems form the technological basis to support projects for long-term access and archiving.

Scientific computing, pattern recognition and visualization

Experiences with high performance computing, pattern recognition and visualization are used to test the demands of digitization processes. The requirements of the 3D laboratory have been used as a test operation for new file structures and services in order to offer more efficient processing of the increasing digitisation of collection objects. The current throughput through the existing CT alone is about 100TB (Tera Byte) per year. Further scientific projects and the experience gained will be used to develop scientific computing into a central component of the IT infrastructure. Resources and evaluation activities were used to make these IT services available to other research groups and scientific topics. For example, the cluster components were expanded with massive computing capacities and storage possibilities.