Department of Informatics and Telematics

Over the years, the Department has invested in building its own cloud infrastructure that can be used for both educational and research purposes. The virtualization technology used is a combination of Vmware and Ovirt, the latter being the open-source upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. More than 100 virtual machines are currently hosted in the Department’s servers which together provide more than 2THz of CPU power and 3TB of memory along with 100TB of storage made accessible to the cluster through fiber channel.

 The vast majority of virtual machines are running Linux (mostly Debian and Ubuntu) while a Kubernetes cluster is currently running several containers used in the Department’s R&D projects. Various services are made available to the academic community, including:

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  •  a Samba domain controller providing a unified way of administering the Linux and Windows workstations at the labs of the Department,
  • a Samba file server hosting the user home directories with 5GB quota for each user,
  • a Nextcloud service that is used to provide web access to the user home folders through a web interface both on and off campus,
  • a Zabbix monitoring platform for continuously monitoring the state of critical services such as the ones mentioned above,
  • a Budibase installation that is used in the digital transformation of several departmental processes and procedures related to the undergraduate and postgraduate study programmes.

The private cloud is also used to host various virtual machines related to the Study in Greece initiative and several Horizon 2020 research projects. The servers of the Department are hosted in the basement of the building and in the event of power failure, they can be powered by the building’s uninterrupted power supply (UPS) and Diesel generator.

The building data center also hosts servers dedicated for institutional applications including the e-class and e-studies platform and others. There is a dedicated privately-owned fiber network connecting the building to the main campus providing connectivity at 10Gb/s.