Bordeaux Montaigne University × Huawei: Where Data at Scale Inspires Human Insight

As a university with hundreds of teaching and research staff, thousands of students, and multiple administrative service departments, Bordeaux Montaigne University generates massive amounts of files every day, ranging from shared office documents and email data (including attachments) to administrative records and teaching materials (Altheimer, 2025). This is leading the conventional storage architecture to gradually fall short of growing scalability and performance demands.

Against this backdrop, Huawei OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage stands out thanks to its high density, high bandwidth, and multi-protocol interworking, meaning it is able to fully meet the university's actual needs. It supports both conventional file interfaces, such as NFS and SMB, and the native S3 object protocol, paving the way for the university's future cloud native applications. More importantly, a single cluster carries both file and object data, eliminating the management complexity and data silos caused by multiple storage systems.

According to the university's IT infrastructure team, OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage is the optimal choice for accessing huge volumes of unstructured data in hybrid workload environments, driving efficient data flows that deliver real value to management and services.

Bordeaux Montaigne University is currently planning to deploy a unified, centralized logging platform, enabling logs from all servers and network devices to be continuously streamed into an S3 cluster built on OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage every day. According to French laws and regulations, log data must be retained in its entirety for at least one year. Traditional archiving methods often face risks of being overwritten, accidentally deleted, or tampered with. These concerns have led the Legal Hold function provided by Huawei data storage products to stand out as the highlight of the solution. Once Legal Hold is enabled, no user—including administrators—can delete or modify log objects within the retention period. This guarantees that in the event of a resilience incident or a compliance audit, the integrity and evidentiary value of the logs are protected at the highest level.

It is also worth noting that the university's service centers—including human resources, digital services, and finance—receive a massive volume of user attachments each day. These files often contain sensitive information, such as personal IDs, bank account details, health records, and even payroll data. In the past, this data was scattered across various email systems or shared folders, making granular access control difficult and leaving the constant threat of data leaks. Today, thanks to S3 bucket policies on OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage and the customizability of S3 object metadata, data storage is much better organized and controlled.

Eventually, the university's IT team will be able to explore more innovative data governance solutions in the AI era. For example, upon uploading, the system can automatically apply AI-driven tagging based on source forms or the inherent characteristics of documents and files, thus laying a solid foundation for data minimization and access auditing.

From storing data to governing data, the university's storage evolution is a clear response to the needs of digital and intelligent era. Huawei OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage carries more than just data; it carries trust and hope for the future. With storage empowering education, the university is undoubtedly on a path to a smarter, warmer, and more resilient campus.