Protecting one of the main resources of the Maastricht University: its data

Maastricht University chose for one of the Cellnex Netherlands’ telecom and data tower to be the location for its new datacenter. The choice took into account proximity, continuity and flexibility.

The new Maastricht University’s datacenter mission is to keep in a safe place one of the most valuable resources of the institution: its data. According to the ICTS Operations, Peter Verheijen, the quality of the current datacenter areas “was no longer in line with the growing ambitions of the University. For instance, they failed to provide emergency power supplies because in the city centre is not permitted”.

The best solution was to house the data to a remote datacentre, preferably one located in close proximity, something requested by many of the University researchers. “We wanted to place our own equipment”, confirms Verheijen, “because for the time being we still have many systems in-house, including the hardware”.

The new location for the datacenter had to focus on sustainability, that also make sense from a point of view of costs: “The level of power consumption of a datacentre is high. You can save a lot of money by paying close attention to energy consumption”, explains Verheijen.

Two candidates were able to meet the requirements determined for the new datacentre, and the Masstricht University chose Cellnex’s. The complete new approach offered the opportunity to make everything more robust and to start working with new network technology. “Cellnex helped us with preparing the cabling which makes it relatively easy to make changes”, confirm Verheijen.

The new location also allowed to make a step further towards realisation of a state-of-the-art IT infrastructure, that will allow an easy expansion if required. “We want to be the first university in the Netherlands to meet the FAIR principles. The idea behind this is that data should be retrievable, accessible, interchangeable and reusable”, concludes Verheijen.

Photo: By Nobbelicious - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0