Case Study: RWTH Aachen University strengthens cybersecurity and backup resiliency with Hitachi Vantara

Consolidate Digital Backup to Object Services at Scale and Boost Cybersecurity

RWTH Aachen University partnered with Hitachi Vantara to help deliver a standardized backup and recovery service for 29 universities and higher education institutions in North Rhine-Westphalia. The goal was to replace fragmented, institution-by-institution backup processes with a fast, reliable, and more cyber-resilient data protection service at scale.

Hitachi Vantara implemented a geo-redundant, high-availability Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) cluster across six locations, paired with Hitachi Data Protection Suite powered by Commvault. The solution enabled self-service backup and recovery, supported immutable backups, and improved protection against ransomware. RWTH reported 7,000 active backups across 56 PB of storage, faster onboarding, and rapid recovery—including a 10 TB restore completed the same day after a cyberattack.

RWTH Aachen University

Thomas Eifert

RWTH Aachen University