GARR is Italy’s research and education network. Its footprint spans ~24,000 kilometres of fibre with a capacity of 39 terabits per second, connecting 1,000+ sites. The Italian NREN serves around 3 million users, making it a cornerstone of the country’s academic and scientific community. On top of high-performance connectivity, GARR builds and operates the digital services needed to transfer and store large datasets and to monitor networks and services in real time.
Scientific data isn’t slowing down, and its value — scientific, strategic, social — means the infrastructure holding it has to be more dependable and sovereign than before. That’s what pushed GARR and Cubbit to launch Edustorage, a new storage model built around resilience, independence and full data sovereignty, designed to solve problems Italian researchers actually have.
Challenge
“For GARR, providing the research and education community with reliable, secure, and sustainable digital infrastructure is a strategic priority.”
Massimo Carboni, Chief Technical Officer at GARR
GARR runs storage to support both its network services and the wider scientific community. Much of that data matters a great deal and needs to stay available for decades, move securely between heterogeneous research groups, and satisfy tightening regulatory requirements, including those from Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ACN).
Previous open-source solutions worked, up to a point. Individual components were reliable enough, but the setup had no real geographic dimension and wasn’t easy to run day-to-day. Service continuity meant something within a few kilometres, nowhere close to surviving the loss of a whole site. Ultimately, it lacked deployment flexibility. Public cloud was never really on the table: handing data to outside infrastructure would mean losing direct control, and for a public network serving national research, that’s not something you trade away.
Solution
“The adoption of distributed, geo-replicated object storage solutions is a fundamental step in responding to the exponential growth of scientific data and new requirements for resilience, security, and regulatory compliance.”
Massimo Carboni, Chief Technical Officer at GARR
GARR integrated DS3 Composer, Cubbit’s software-defined object storage, across its data centres in Bologna, Naples, and Palermo — a 1 petabyte storage layer of a larger, five-site GARR network that also includes Bari and Rome for orchestration. Together they form Edustorage: Italy’s first federated, geo-distributed storage network for universities and research institutions, run entirely on-premises by GARR.
The system combines Cubbit’s natively distributed object storage with GARR’s high-speed network. Data is encrypted, fragmented, and replicated across multiple sites, so no single location ever holds a full copy. Multi-layer erasure coding keeps data always-on, even if one or more sites fail.
S3 compatibility lets the system fit straight into workflows universities and research institutions already use — no code changes required. Main use cases include immutable backup, disaster recovery, and long-term storage of partially processed datasets for analysis and predictive reporting.
What makes this genuinely different is the federated structure. Universities and research bodies can join by contributing their own hardware, so they’re active participants rather than end users of someone else’s system. Each institution keeps exclusive, segregated access to its own data, but can open specific projects or datasets to outside collaborators, including groups beyond the GARR network.
Through a single intuitive interface, GARR can activate multiple flexible service tiers based on how sensitive or valuable the data is, letting each institution manage its own storage spaces, permissions, projects and configurations autonomously via a dedicated self-service interface. Less admin, less pressure on internal teams, more time for research.
Result
“Working with Cubbit allows us to retain full control over data while advancing a distributed, on-premises model consistent with GARR’s principles of digital autonomy and support for research.”
Massimo Carboni, Chief Technical Officer at GARR
With DS3 Composer, GARR has created Edustorage: the first storage network of its kind in Europe, federated and geo-distributed, built specifically for research. GARR runs it entirely on-premises, with no third-party dependency, and technology enabling compliance with NIS2, GDPR and Italy’s national ACN requirements.
For GARR, it’s also a way into the storage market in its own right. Universities and research institutions get a new line of value-added services built on resilience and independence, and GARR becomes a key player in delivering federated S3 object storage for research and education. Running on S3, still the most widely used protocol for this kind of work, gives the whole research ecosystem a shared standard to work from. Cubbit’s team continues supporting GARR through the rollout.
Phase one is already live. Phase two extends the system to all eight GARR data centres nationwide. Universities and research institutions can join now, contributing their own hardware and gaining access to infrastructure that’s sovereign, resilient, and built around what Italian research actually needs.
Find out More
Discover how NRENs can replicate this model, and how universities and research centres can benefit from it: join GARR and Cubbit’s webinar on 22 September 2026, 1–2 pm (CET).
Visit GARR’s website.
