Source: Own illustration
The wait is finally over: the migration of research data to the new DataStorage.nrw storage system is complete. A total of approximately 2.7 PB of research data was migrated between July 2025 and January 2026.
In this blog post, we give you an overview of the migration process and the benefits it brings to researchers throughout North Rhine-Westphalia.
Improved Cooperation Between Universities in North Rhine-Westphalia
A new storage system, DataStorage.nrw, has been available since July 2025. The research data previously stored via Coscine in Research Data Storage (RDS) has been completely migrated to the new system.
DataStorage.nrw can be used by all researchers at participating universities of DH.NRW. Access is provided via the NFDI login, among other things, and is therefore easily possible across institutional boundaries. The research data is organized into projects, with the project managers themselves determining who has access. Depending on their respective roles (owner, member, guest), project members can view, edit, or manage data.
The four locations (Aachen, Duisburg-Essen, Cologne, and Paderborn) of DataStorage.nrw offer protection against server failures and cyberattacks. Should one location fail, the stored data will therefore remain secure.
The Migration in Numbers
DataStorage.nrw has 24 PB of storage space, three times as much as its predecessor, RDS.nrw. During the migration from July 2025 to January 2026, a total of approximately 2.7 PB of research data was migrated. The data was distributed across 1,421 projects in Coscine. During the entire migration, around 409.7 million files were migrated from the old system to the new system, with a maximum of around 10 million files transferred in a single day. (*)
Storage Space Requests
DataStorage.nrw is available to all researchers from participating universities. Storage space requests can be submitted via the Coscine JARDS platform. Help with applying for storage space is provided by the Coscine Selection Policy, which gives an overview of the criteria for approving DataStorage.nrw storage space requests. We have also already described the general process for applying for storage space in a previous blog post.
Thank You to the Coscine Team and All Users!
We are very pleased that the migration was successfully completed within six months. We would like to take this opportunity to thank both the Coscine team for the implementation and the Coscine users for their understanding that their projects and resources were temporarily unavailable.
Responsible for the content of this article are Hedda Faber, Katja Jansen and Arlinda Ujkani.
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