e-Infrastructure

Developing a horizontal electronic infrastructure for production, exploitation and dissemination of knowledge.

The National Documentation Centre of Greece is located at the National Hellenic Research Foundation. At EKT the work disseminates knowledge for the benefit of society and for that reason, EKT has invested in technology, infrastructure, know-how and a well-trained workforce.  At the crossroad of -Infrastructure-Technology & People- lies EKT’s contribution for the provision of high level services for cultural and scientific organisations and society ensuring that newly generated and already existing knowledge will be exploited to the fullest and reused in research, education and entrepreneurship. EKT has the following installation facilities which are constantly updated:

A state-of-the-art-and well-equipped Datacentre

The Datacentre constitutes a long term national investment in infrastructure and personnel in order to provide modern, innovative and effective services of high quality, availability and highly scalable architecture to meet the needs of organisations using it.  It houses EKT’s eInfrastructures and hosts systems of other organisations using Green IT technologies to minimise environmental and financial costs.

The main Datacentre service is horizontal support for the information systems used to provide services to online users. It also supports the online applications developed and share such as digital repositories, e-publications, registers and indexes, statistics and indicators, as well as ABEKT software and the openABEKT service. In addition, it offers hosting and support services for third parties, providing additional features (physical equipment, network, environmental conditions, stable and uninterrupted power supply, increased physical and software security etc) that give added value to the services.

The Datacentre is a reference point for the country, where, besides the organization's e-infrastructure and the GEANT, PITHOS and ViMA nodes are hosted in a specially designed space (over 100 square metres and an emergency generator power supply of 550 KVA). The virtualization platform, which has been in operation since 2007, supports approximately 240 physical and virtual servers, minimizing financial and environmental costs.

Green IT principles are applied and the centre designs tools for monitoring, recording and improving energy consumption aiming at long-term sustainability and lower environmental costs. In order to ensure flexible and low costs, the centre uses Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to provide scalable services without software licencing fees and extensively applies technology for virtualization.

 In order to guarantee reliability, organization and system safety, the mechanisms for monitoring, management and control are all in real time for more than 2,500 parameters with alert and response capabilities.

 Finally, the datacentre offers a number of supportive but extremely important and critical services. The most important of these are:

(a) reliable network services using state-of-the-art equipment with high speed multipaths (10Gbps fiber/copper),

(b) advanced services network security logic using  firewalls, encryption architecture, etc.

(c) backup with magnetic media with high capacity using robotic libraries,

(d) detailed historical record of energy consumption and cost of equipment subsections and

(e) 24/7 monitoring and historical documenting of the functioning of the services, equipment and environmental conditions with automatic technical resets for proper functioning and/or alerts.

A unique eInfrastructure for libraries, conferences and teleconferencing

High-speed wireless broadband access is available for library users and visitors to the National Hellenic Research Foundation. EKT uses live streaming and video on demand to cover events held in the NHRF Amphitheatre L.Zervas, have a video library hosting a rich collection of multimedia content (videos and photos) available at media.ekt.gr and a cutting edge media room fully-equipped for teleconferencing, seminars and training sessions.

Cutting edge equipment for digitisation of different types of files

Cutting-edge technological advances now allow the electronic maintenance of virtually any file type. Cultural, historical and scientific documents such as books, manuscripts, musical scores, maps, museum exhibits, paintings, sculptures, audio and film material, are digitised and made available on the web. State-of-the-art equipment enables digitisation of a variety of document types, materials and dimensions (bound printed material up to A2+ in size, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, diaries, photographs, negative and positive film, microfilm, microfiches, three dimensional items etc). Digitised files can then be documented and hosted in the Datacenter.

EKT Digital Library of Science, Technology and Culture

The EKT Digital Library of Science, Technology and Culture provides electronic access to thousands of open Greek and international collections of journals, books, databases and PhD theses, actively contributing to the reuse of authoritative scientific and cultural content. All content is directly accessible to members from the ‘K.Th. Dimaras’ library, housed in the National Hellenic Research Foundation building. The library, one of the largest libraries for scientific and technological journals in Greece, is publicly accessible and is open to the public 12 hours a day.