Swiss University Safeguards Mission‑Critical Academic Operations with Cyber Resilient, Unified Data Infrastructure from Hitachi Vantara

Hitachi Vantara, a data storage, infrastructure and hybrid cloud management subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., announced that the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) is modernizing its IT infrastructure with a hybrid cloud solution from Hitachi Vantara.In collaboration with Swiss IT service provider Sonio AG, the university implemented an integrated block and object storage architecture that seamlessly connects on-premises systems and cloud services, while delivering maximum data resilience vs. cyber threats.

With more than 14,000 students, 3,200 employees, and 57 bachelor’s and master’s programs, FHNW is one of the largest universities of applied sciences in Switzerland and depends on reliable, fast, and secure access to data. Today, the university protects over 1,100 virtual machines, approximately 350 TB of data, and more than 150 TB of M365 cloud data. With support from Hitachi Vantara, FHNW is experiencing backup transfers that are now up to 4x faster, and ransomware‑resilient recovery operations that previously took days can now be completed in minutes.

“Data sits at the heart of our teaching, research, and administrative operations,” said Patrick Gebhard, system engineer, data center, FHNW. “Restoring deleted data used to be a long, manual process tied to short retention time on disk and an ineffiecient way to copy restorepoints. Now we can recover the right data within minutes during interactive support sessions with our users. The experience is faster, smoother, and improves service quality and user satisfaction.”

Predictable Business Continuity and Protection Against Cyber Threats
The solution combines a Veeam Backup & Recovery solution with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) block storage arrays as primary backup repositories. By leveraging Veeam’s Copy Job functionality, backup data is written directly to an object storage solution with Object Lock enabled, enforcing immutability for a 30-day retention period. This means that once a backup is is written, it cannot be modified, encrypted, or deleted – by anyone – until the retention window expires. This architecture delivers a fully cyber-resilient backup copy strategy, purpose built for archiving and long-term recoverability and ensures the availability of teaching, research, and administrative operations in the event of cyber incidents or other disruptions.

In addition, the efficient primary backup storage solution reduces cost and power consumption by 40% – a significant contribution to FHNW’s sustainability goals. FHNW was also able to operate its backup infrastructure with 40% fewer tape drives.

At the heart of a modern, hybrid cloud data foundation is Hitachi Vantara’s Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One), a unified data storage platform designed for high performance, AI-driven data management and cyber resilience, including a 100% data availability guarantee. It features a single data plane and includes block, file, and object storage solutions.

“Object storage, such as VSP One Object, is increasingly becoming the foundation of modern IT infrastructures – not only for backups, but also for AI workloads and data analysis. By partnering with Hitachi Vantara, FHNW has built a scalable data foundation that can grow with its requirements,” said Michael Roth, GM, Switzerland, Hitachi Vantara.

Protection against cyber threats
“With the Hitachi Vantara storage solution developed by our partner Sonio, we can finally follow backup best practices such as the 3-2-1 rule,” summarizes Gebhard. “All in all, we benefit from faster backup performance and improved resilience vs. cyber threats and other security risks.”

“With our comprehensive expertise in cloud and data solutions, we understood exactly what FHNW needed. Hitachi Vantara object storage provides the university with new object storage capabilities to optimize and standardize operations and helps the IT team adapt to changing regulatory requirements and innovate,” said Sasa Gržinić, head of marketing & partner management, Sonio AG.