According to the people in the ZIB stored data are practically the most important value. Correspondingly high are our efforts related to security, speed and capacity of the central data storage that is provided by the Department of IT Service.

An increasingly important role belongs of long-term storage of irreplaceable data, such as results of measurements of physical experiments, digitized views of archaeological artifacts and documents.
For this purpose we give users access to virtual machines on powerful servers which are able to access capacity on data storage.

In addition to high own requirements for storage capacity, there is a use by external scientific institutes in the form of cooperations. For this purpose we give them virtual machines on powerful servers which have access  to the data storage. Our work is an exact and securely reproducibility of the data as a stream of bits  without examining the contents of the data. A continuous improvement of the underlying technology sometimes requires a migration of data. This is also done by us.