On 22 September, GARR and Cubbit will present Edustorage in a webinar: a pilot project for a federated, geographically distributed storage network for the education and research community.
The exponential growth of research data is making it increasingly important to have reliable, resilient and always-available storage infrastructures, while ensuring full control over data and compliance with security and regulatory requirements.
It is in this context that Edustorage was created through a collaboration between GARR and Cubbit, combining GARR’s high-capacity network with Cubbit’s distributed S3 object storage. Edustorage is the first federated and geographically distributed storage network in Europe dedicated to the education and research community and based on infrastructure independent of third-party providers.
The model enables institutions to take an active role by joining the network and contributing their own hardware to the development of the infrastructure. In this way, organisations retain exclusive control over their own data while participating in a shared infrastructure, benefiting at the same time from resilience, availability, high performance and the ability to selectively share data with external groups.
Data is encrypted, fragmented and distributed across multiple geographically distinct sites. No single site therefore stores the data in its entirety, increasing the resilience of the infrastructure and ensuring that data remains accessible even if one or more sites become unavailable.
A webinar to discover Edustorage
To explore the project in more detail, GARR and Cubbit will present Edustorage at a webinar organised by GÉANT on 22 September 2026, from 13:00 to 14:00 CET.
The webinar will provide an opportunity to discuss the key challenges faced by research and education organisations in managing data, looking at the solutions most commonly adopted today and the trade-offs they involve in terms of control, complexity, security and IT resources.
The webinar will also feature the GARR case study, offering an in-depth look at the benefits and technical aspects of Edustorage, as well as the characteristics of a model that could be replicated in other European countries.
Programme
- The key challenges facing the education and research community, beyond security and compliance
- The most common storage solutions currently adopted and their main trade-offs
- The GARR case study: benefits, technical features and prospects for a replicable federated model
Speakers
- Massimo Carboni, CTO, GARR
- Fabio Farina, DevOps Team Lead, GARR
- Alessandro Cillario, Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Cubbit
- Giorgio Finazzi, Lead Solution Architect, Cubbit
The webinar is aimed in particular at CTOs, Heads of Infrastructure, IT managers and technical leads from NRENs, universities, research institutions and other organisations within the European education and research community.