Sciebo

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Sciebo

Sciebo logo
Basic data

Publishing year 2015
operating system Windows , macOS , Linux , Android , iOS
category Backup and synchronization
German speaking Yes
www.sciebo.de

Sciebo (proper spelling sciebo , short for science box , inspired by the Latin verb scibo "I will know", so German ski Boh spoken) is a non-commercial file hosting - services for research, teaching and learning. It enables the automatic synchronization of data with different end devices ("Sync") and the joint work on documents ("Share"). The service is operated jointly by 28 universities and research institutions in North Rhine-Westphalia and funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia . The data is stored and processed exclusively at three locations in North Rhine-Westphalia (Münster, Bonn, Duisburg-Essen). This means that the data is subject to the German Federal Data Protection Act .

history

The idea of ​​setting up a university's own cloud storage service as an alternative to commercial services such as Dropbox , Google Drive, etc. originally came from an initiative by students at the University of Münster in spring 2012. The background was that in addition to private, sensitive study or work-related data were stored on such storage media, and commercial services based abroad are viewed as questionable from a data protection point of view. At the time, however, there was a lack of alternatives that would bring the functionality of such services in line with German data protection law.

After the first surveys showed a large user potential, the Center for Information Processing (ZIV) took up the topic and promoted it in the working group of the heads of scientific data centers in NRW (ARNW), the committee of IT directors of 14 universities in North Rhine-Westphalia, Ahead. In June 2012 it was decided to set up a jointly operated private on-premise sync & share cloud storage service for all universities in North Rhine-Westphalia (with a potential of 500,000 users). The ZIV took over the project management. After initial considerations on the system architecture, potential software solutions and system integrators were identified at the end of 2012 and finally tendering procedures for the software and hardware were carried out at the end of 2012 / beginning of 2013.

After a kick-off meeting on January 15, 2013, 16 universities declared their binding participation in the “Sync & Share” consortium . At the same time, a scientific support project was started in order to be able to adapt the service to the needs of the users with empirical support in terms of features and size. The results served as support for a project application that was submitted to the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Research of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (MIWF) in May 2013 and passed on to the German Research Foundation (DFG) for assessment.

In May 2012 the market research and product evaluation phase began. The Institute for Information Systems at WWU provided scientific support for the project and provided a needs assessment based on an inter-university survey conducted by the ZIV with over 10,000 participants. The study revealed a high level of interest on the part of students and institute staff. In order to determine the storage and functionality of the service, further studies were initiated in the following year.

On January 15, 2013, the founding event for the Sync & Share NRW consortium took place. The consortium was led by the ZIV of the University of Münster, which is responsible for the introduction and operation of the service.

In March 2014, the Ministry for Innovation, Research and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia decided to fund the project with an initial amount of EUR 2.79 million.

Marketing for Sciebo was also carried out at the Center for Information Processing in Münster in parallel with the technical implementation. In order to achieve better brand recognition, the shorter and more memorable name “sciebo” was chosen for the service instead of “Sync & Share NRW”. The green elephant in the Sciebo logo should represent the properties of the service - size, resilience, resilience. At the end of 2014, a marketing team of WWU students was put together to support the PR team at ZIV in order to plan an online viral campaign for the introduction of the service. The central web presence of the service has been online since January 2015.

On February 2, 2015 Sciebo was launched at 14 universities in North Rhine-Westphalia. On June 10, 2014 Sciebo won the EUNIS Elite Award for Excellence. The award is given to projects across Europe that stand out in the use of information systems at universities due to their particular innovation and efficiency. The award was presented during the EUNIS 2015 Congress at the University of Abertay in Scotland.

Sciebo can currently be used at 28 universities and research institutions.

“Sync & Share NRW” consortium

The structure of the “Sync & Share NRW” consortium as well as the contractual framework were developed in the course of a research project funded by the MIWF NRW for the “drafting of contract models for cross-university cooperation projects in the IT sector”, which the Institute for Technology and Media Law (ITM) and the ZIV supervised together. The resulting model contracts are also available to the universities in North Rhine-Westphalia for other, similar, cooperative IT projects. A future update is planned.

Structure of the “Sync & Share NRW” consortium

There is a consortium leader , the Center for Information Processing of the WWU Münster , who acts as an applicant and grant recipient to the MIWF NRW. All universities participating in the consortium are participants. The three universities involved in the operation (the universities of Bonn, Duisburg-Essen and Münster) are also operators. All legal transactions are carried out by the consortium leader; as the recipient of the grant, the system is owned by him and he is responsible for raising the own financing. He acts for the consortium in the implementation of the joint large equipment application (especially procurement) and the operation of the system.

The instrument of order data processing is chosen as the legal framework for the storage of end user data in Sciebo. Accordingly, the responsibility for compliance with data protection lies with the participating universities. These make the service available to authorized end users (employees and / or students). There is no direct legal relationship between the consortium leader / operator and the end users.

Sciebo cloud service

Functions

Sciebo enables the automatic synchronization of files between different end devices ( Infrastructure-as-a-Service ). This means that the stored data is always up-to-date and available on all of the user's devices without manual comparison. An internet connection is required for data synchronization. If the user is offline, changed files are synchronized as soon as the connection is re-established. Access can be via a web interface, a desktop or a mobile client. Any number of devices can be connected to a Sciebo account.

Each user has 30 GB of free storage available upon registration. Employees of the participating institutions can expand their storage space up to 500 GB. For working together on large projects, Sciebo project boxes from 500 GB up to 5 TB can be approved at the respective facility.

By default, all folders and files in Sciebo are not publicly visible. Other users must first be invited to participate. After the invitation, all changes to the shared objects are synchronized. Invited members receive reading and editing rights.

Simultaneous editing of documents has also been possible since November 2017.

Solution architecture

Sciebo uses the open source software ownCloud 10 Enterprise. As WebDAV Sync interface comes while the open source technology saber / dav , in Muenster based fruux GmbH used.

Scheme of the three-site concept with local ownCloud installations

Sciebo is spread across three data centers in Münster , Bonn and Essen . A total of 16 Linux servers, each with two eight-core CPUs and 128 GB of RAM, are in use. Three petabytes are provided as storage, which run on three GSS storage systems from IBM . This means that a maximum of 14 GB of data can be written per second. Furthermore, four database servers are operated with MySQL . These are each equipped with 800 GByte SSDs and 256 GByte RAM .

The data is replicated between the locations in order to achieve a high level of data security. Furthermore, the data is stored with a triple parity procedure ( RAID 6 + 3 - i.e. 3 bits of parity information per byte instead of 2 for classic RAID 6). In addition, a technique with very short recovery times after a hard disk failure is used (declustered RAID).

safety

Sciebo is offered by non-commercial, public service bodies. Data at Sciebo is only stored and processed in the German university data centers in Bonn, Duisburg-Essen and Münster. You are therefore subject to the German data protection law.

The data transfer to the respective end devices is SSL- encrypted, but the data on the servers is stored unencrypted. There is no encryption on the client side in order to prevent the usability of the service from being restricted. For complete security, the service recommends encrypting the data before uploading it.

Participating institutions

The service is only available to students and employees of the participating institutions. Access to Sciebo does not end immediately with the end of membership in the respective institution. After the end of membership, end users are given a grace period of six months before their data is deleted.

Universities

Universities of applied sciences

Non-university institutions

literature

  • R. Vogl, D. Rudolph, A. Thoring, H. Angenent, S. Stieglitz, C. Meske: How to Build a Cloud Storage Service for Half a Million Users in Higher Education: Challenges Met and Solutions Found. In: Proceedings of the 48th HICSS (Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences). Hawaii 2016.
  • R. Vogl, H. Angenent, D. Rudolph, A. Thoring, C. Schild, S. Stieglitz, C. Meske: sciebo - theCampuscloud for NRW. In: Proceedings of the EUNIS 21st Congress 2015, Dundee, Scotland. 2015. (Link)
  • S. Stieglitz, C. Meske, R. Vogl, D. Rudolph: Do Universities Need To Host a Cloud Computing? In: Contributed to the Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) 2014. Auckland, New Zealand 2014.
  • C. Meske, S. Stieglitz, R. Vogl, D. Rudolph, A. Öksüz: Cloud Storage Services in Higher Education - Results of a Preliminary Study in the Context of the Sync & Share Project in Germany. In: Zaphiris, P. Ioannou (Ed.): Learning and Collaboration Technologies. Designing and Developing Novel Learning Experiences. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. (= Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction (HCI International 2014), Crete, Greece). A. Springer International Publishing, Cham 2014, pp. 161–171. (Link)
  • N. Walter, A. Öksüz, D. Compeau, R. Vogl, D. Rudolph, B. Distel, J. Becker: Sync & Share North Rhine-Westphalia. In: Proceedings of the 22nd European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2014), Tel Aviv, Israel. 2014. (Link)
  • R. Vogl, H. Angenent, D. Rudolph, C. Schild, D. Bucher, S. Ost, S. Stieglitz, C. Meske: Sync & Share NRW - From a student inquiry to a major project. In: O. Kao, T. Hildmann (Ed.): Cloud storage in university use. Proceedings of the conference "Cloud storage in university use" on May 5th and 6th 2014 at the IT Service Center (tubIT) of the Technical University of Berlin. Universitätsverlag of TU Berlin, Berlin 2014, pp. 5–19. (Link)
  • R. Vogl, H. Angenent, R. Bockholt, D. Rudolph, S. Stieglitz, C. Meske: Designing a Large Scale Cooperative Sync & Share Cloud Storage Platform for the Academic Community in Northrhine-Westfalia. In: U. Sukovski (Ed.): ICT Role for Next Generation Universities - 19th European University Information Systems - EUNIS 2013 Congress Proceedings. Riga Technical University, 2013, pp. 205-208. (Link)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.hrz.uni-bonn.de/de/services/datenablage-fileservices/sciebo
  2. ↑ https://rrzk.uni-koeln.de/sciebo.html , accessed on November 18, 2018
  3. ↑ http://www.sciebo.de/imperia/md/content/syncshare/papertuberlin2014.pdf
  4. ↑ https://eunis2013-journals.rtu.lv/article/view/eunis.2013.008
  5. ↑ http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-07482-5_16
  6. ↑ http://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2014/proceedings/track18/2/
  7. ↑ http://www.wn.de/Muenster/1869361-NRW-Hochschulen-haben-Campus-Cloud-in-Betrieb-Sicher-im-Daten-Dschungel
  8. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.wdr5.de
  9. ↑ http://www.eunis.org/eunis2015/congress-2/awards/
  10. ↑ http://www.sciebo.de/de/login/index.html
  11. ↑ https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Sciebo-Eine-Owncloud-fuer-ueber-300-000-Studierende-2534903.html
  12. ↑ http://www.derwesten.de/staedte/duisburg/ude-campus-hat-jetzt-eigene-daten-cloud-aimp-id10342921.html
  13. ↑ http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/campus-cloud-hochschuldatenspeicher-im-netz.680.de.html?dram:article_id=311270
  14. ↑ https://twitter.com/sciebo/status/932602806372102145
  15. ↑ https://owncloud.org/blog/owncloud-and-sabredav/
  16. ↑ http://bildungsklick.de/pm/93081/sichere-cloud-fuer-nrw-hochschulen-kostenloser-speicherdienst-sciebo-startet-am-2-februar-2015/
  17. ↑ https://www.sciebo.de/de/hilfe/sicherheit.html
  18. ↑ http://www.sciebo.de/de/login/index.html