IT infrastructure for the Vatican’s ‘digital’ library

The five-year project will see several million pages of manuscripts and incunabula held at the Vatican and at the Bodleian Library in Oxford transferred into digital format. These will also include ancient Greek and Hebrew texts held at the Vatican Apostolic Library.

Home of the digitised documentation will be a new data centre from Rittal combining both energy efficiency and maximum flexibility, and with Rittal’s IT infrastructure forming the project’s backbone.

Located next to the offices of the Vatican Library’s employees, the data centre floor plan and the construction were carefully planned by Rittal. The draft plan included four sections comprising eight Rittal TS 8 server racks and four liquid cooling packages (LCPs), one to be installed in each section.

Two of these sections have already been expanded during the first phase of the project. Climate control in the server racks is performed by LCP Inline units. Warm air is then transported via air/water heat exchangers in order to maintain a suitable temperature for the servers housed in the IT racks.

Installed security, video surveillance and access control systems provide a high level of security for the archived data. Rittal’s Computer Multi Control (CMC III) monitoring system will guarantee the smooth operation of the data and report immediately any malfunctions such as a sudden rise in temperature in a server rack.

An uninterruptible power supply is also provided as a further security measure and will back up all four sections of the data centre to ensure the highest possible availability.

The entire security and cooling strategies are monitored and managed via Rittal’s RiZone software application. RiZone bridges the gap between IT and building infrastructures, thanks to its support for the SNMP and BACnet protocols. It can communicate with a server management system, such as Microsoft's System Centre Operation Manager, and exert direct influence over the availability of individual applications.

Monsignor Cesare Pasini, prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library, says that transferring these works to digital format is a way of "better conserving cultural heritage, facilitating consultation and ensuring a high-quality reproduction before any eventual degradation of the original. It also means making those works immediately accessible to many more people online".