Over the past two years IT managers at the public research universities in Germany’s most populous state, Northrhine-Westfalia, have been researching how to build a private inter-university cloud. It will provide about 6 Petabytes of free-to-use storage to 500,000 affiliates of more than 30 public research and applied science universities in the region, Raimund Vogl, director of IT at Münster University wrote on Linux.com.
To accomplish this, they sought a partnership with ownCloud, the open source file sync and share software, to provide access to the universities’ own scale-out storage platform. In addition to meeting all of their technical requirements, ownCloud’s open source approach led them to trust that it was a secure and flexible platform, Vogl said.
