The Vatican has become the first customer to purchase EMC’s Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) technology.
The EMC ECS Appliance, marketed as a breakthrough hyperscale storage infrastructure designed for the data centre, is powered by EMC’s ViPR 2.0. It has been designed in an effort to redefine storage economics, and balance the benefits of the public cloud – cost, simplicity, scalability – with the security and control of the private cloud.
The Vatican has purchased a full rack (3PB object store) as part of a project to digitise its historical artefacts.
Announcing ECS’s inaugural customer, David Goulden, CEO of EMC Information Infrastructure, said: "ECS has been endorsed by a power higher than any of us. A great customer and, I can assure you, a very important customer for us to keep happy going forward."
One of the oldest libraries in the world, the Vatican Apostolic Library holds many of the rarest and most valuable documents in existence including the 42 line Latin Bible of Gutenberg, the first book printed with movable type and dating between 1451 and 1455.
EMC is supporting the Vatican Library’s goal of preserving in an ISO-certifiable digital format delicate texts vulnerable to deterioration and decay from repeated handling, ensuring that the accumulated knowledge of generations is freely available for future study.
Additional manuscripts being digitised include:
– The Sifra, a Hebrew manuscript written between the end of the 9th Century and the middle of the 10th, one of the oldest extant Hebrew codes;
– Greek testimonies of the works of Homer, Sophocles, Plato and Hippocrates-The famous incunabulum of Pius II’s De Europa, printed by Albrecht Kunne in Memmingen in around 1491;
– The Code-B, one of the oldest extant manuscripts of the Greek Bible, dated to the 4th Century.
