Digitising at the Vatican

Rittal involved in mammoth cultural operation in heart of historic 600 year old facility

Sistine Hall at Vatican Library (Wiki)

The Vatican Apostolic Library is making a valuable contribution to cultural history by completely digitising around 180,000 manuscripts. Set to run for four years, forty million pages will be being recorded during the course of the digitisation project.

Home of the digitised documentation will be a data centre from Rittal combining both energy efficiency and maximum flexibility, 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 planned carefully and accurately by Rittal.

The draft plan included four sections; eight Rittal TS 8 server racks and four liquid cooling packages (LCP) units to be installed in each of them. 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 to ensure the servers in the IT racks do not overheat.

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 the server rack. An uninterrupted power supply will back up all four sections of the data centre to ensure the highest possible availability.The security concept is completed by Rittal’s RiZone management software application.