A celebration of knowledge

Many historians argue the ‘modern era’ begins in the 1960s, with change reshaping every aspect of society.

• Cold War tensions deepen.
• Governments struggle to enact newly granted civil rights.
• Generational rifts break out over long hair, gender norms, and (of course) music.
• And a spirit of counterculture blossoms on campuses as impassioned college students protest canonical scholastic traditions.

Among the headlines in 1964 is also news of a coup d'état in Brazil that ushers in an era of dictatorship that lasts until 1985.

So, it seems hardly an ideal time to solicit state funding to create of a new university. After all, befitting the times, in 1962 fully one-third of Brazil’s student population go on strike to promote democratization and increased funding of higher education (Brazil’s left-leaning National Union of Students—União Nacional de Estudantes, UNE—forms in 1937).

But with an uncanny knack to bridge the chasm between the country’s fervid youth and the conservative military state stands Dr. Zeferino Vaz. This is how, in 1966, the State University of Campinas, Unicamp, breaks ground on its campus in the district of Barão Geraldo, a two-hour drive north of São Paulo.

Fittingly, Dr. Vaz becomes the university’s first rector, and the main campus today is named after him. The current rector, Antonio José de Almeida Meirelles, says, “Unicamp was founded at a difficult time in our country, but…Zeferino preserved academic freedom, bringing [together] important thinkers…creating this force that generates ideas, knowledge, science, and technology in an innovative way.”

His remarks remind us that the 1960s are also a decade of stunning advancements, from the Pill and the first LASER to the first artificial heart, the Moon landing, and the first email message (sent via ARPANET from a server at UCLA to a server at Stanford).

In that same spirit of unstoppable innovation, Unicamp continues its work nearly 60 years later.

Rising on privately donated farmland previously unshaped by civic planning, the university’s flagship campus creates a physical footprint that symbolically represents its philosophical mission. The logo is born of the same design and makes the case that a picture really is worth a thousand words. The campus and logo are steeped in pure mathematics, unsurprising for an institution dedicated to pursuing human knowledge.

It's geometry as geography. A round central space—a symbol of unity—is bordered by the school’s main library, student service buildings, and dining hall. Radiating out from this circular plaza are 24 modules determined by the Cartesian coordinate system. The vectors represent Unicamp’s 24 units: 10 institutes and 14 schools.

In turn, these lines create 13 polygons that echo the 13 stripes on São Paulo’s state flag and define neighborhoods grouping Unicamp’s areas of study. These are aggregated geographically so that boundaries between neighborhoods are logical, with philosophy buildings adjacent to those housing the human sciences, mathematics, and economics, while chemical engineering facilities are near those for biology. The logo’s three red dots anchor the campus’ organization into the Sciences, Exact Sciences, and Humanities. Spanning all disciplines is technology. Taken in total, the master plan physically fulfills the three philosophical core functions of the university: Teaching, Research, and Extension.

Unicamp’s Institute of Biology is the first building completed on the new campus in Campinas. (Today, the biology department offers two undergraduate programs, seven graduate programs, and three interdepartmental complementary units.) In lockstep, regional expansion commences with the integration of a dental school in Piracicaba in 1967 and an engineering school in Limeira in 1969.

Over more than two decades Unicamp expands ever further at a red-hot clip, adding institutes and schools at a rate of nearly one every year. Across this time Dr. Vaz continues in his role as a moderating force between the liberal student union and academics and the conservative regime controlling the government’s authority and purse strings. The results are impressive:

• In 1986 Unicamp acquires a biosciences research center in Paulínia.
• The school also adds night classes to serve working class Brazilians better.
• It embarks on research initiatives with technology partners like Motorola, IBM, and Lucent Technologies.
• It incorporates two of the most highly rated high schools in Brazil and launches programs to reach high school students in communities across the country.
• A 1000-bed hospital serving the public opens in 1979.
• And land purchases in 2014 increase the university’s geographic footprint by 60%.

…to a vast forest

Today, the university offers 70 undergraduate tracks and an astonishing 153 post-graduate tracks, oversees 22 interdisciplinary research centers on its Campinas campus, and offers multiple specialization studies through a network of extension programs. Every year, Unicamp also hosts an open-door event (Unicamp de Portas Abertas, UPA), which sees 50,000 high schoolers visit the main campus to learn about tuition-free higher education opportunities available to them.

In 2023 during the 18th UPA event, Sérgio Vaz honors his father, saying, “I’m very happy to see the [results of the] seed that my father planted.” It’s an ideal metaphor because Unicamp today is a veritable forest, its many trees of knowledge branching out across a global network of joint research partners like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIIT) and Boeing.

With exponential growth comes compounding challenges. With each geographic expansion, each new discipline of coursework, and each additional collaborator comes expanded technology sprawl and new attack surfaces for the dark web to target. It all adds up to additional responsibility for the IT team at Unicamp.

It’s also a prime example of why the world’s most important data lives on NetApp.

Data is everything

With multiple campuses, numerous research partners, and a growing roster of business enterprises incubated by the university, Unicamp’s data strategy is constantly transforming. Fortunately, Paulo Moraes is on the job. As director of software infrastructure for Unicamp, he puts it this way: “My team works on Unicamp’s many implementation and acquisition projects. And while information technology changes daily, I love solving problems and working under pressure. Seeing these many projects through to completion is what’s interesting. It motivates me.”

One of Paulo’s ongoing projects is Unicamp’s deployment in the cloud. Beginning over a decade ago, it’s a journey with multiple milestones. One example: 2021 when NetApp provisions 2.5 petabytes of unified flash storage for data repatriated from a public cloud to an on-premises private search cloud. The AFF C800 storage solution enables the Unicamp community to access all workload types: file, object, and block. Paulo says, “This flash-based solution also provides the best security available. That’s important.”

Unicamp’s hybrid cloud model includes the university’s expansive library system (Sistema de Bibliotecas da Unicamp, SBU). Its central collection of more than one million physical books resides in stacks in Campinas and at 27 satellites. Those volumes are supplemented by:

• 100s of 1000s of ebooks and digitized academic journals.
• An online repository of more than 25,000 Unicamp dissertations.
• And access to the most prominent electronic libraries of scholarly journals in the world.

It’s Gutenberg-meets-AWS. Literally.

Because in November 2024 Unicamp begins to move its intelligent data infrastructure even further into the future when it adopts a hybrid cloud model that integrates its internal cloud with Amazon Web Services.

Paulo says, “I joined Unicamp when I was 17 years old, so I’ve seen 10 rectors in my time here, and I’ve also seen the technology change, including how we use the cloud. It’s something that I saw grow, and today I see the results that we planned for. But one thing hasn’t changed. Data is everything, because data is what drives the university’s research.”

IT sprawl is a challenge for any organization, whether in the data center, cloud, or at the edge. The number of places data resides can seem overwhelming, with Unicamp’s technology footprint an especially compelling case study. While its 678 research groups, 1,864 lines of research, and 293 national and international partner institutions are only part of a bigger story, these numbers alone make clear that aggregating Unicamp’s data into a centralized and intelligent infrastructure is no small feat. But that’s exactly what Paulo and his team are accomplishing, bit by byte by petabyte.

A core component of Unicamp’s on-premises solution to centralize and manage network-attached storage (NAS) is NetApp’s ONTAP S3 (simple storage service) solution. In technical terms, ONTAP creates S3 NAS buckets for S3 clients to read, write, and delete files while conforming to security configurations and logging protocols. The primary benefits to the university’s many stakeholders are flexibility and scalability. Flexibility to store and access tiered data on the fly. And scalability as data volumes in Unicamp’s data lakes only grow with every passing day. This data strategy of centralized information is the rocket fuel powering research in Unicamp’s classrooms, laboratories, and think tanks.

Easy, efficient, and speedy access to those repositories of information becomes even more critical as technologies like AI increasingly change how students, teachers, researchers, and partners engage with data and one another, whether inside the university’s storied walls or halfway across the world. Finally, all of this data transits servers and the cloud in compliance with Brazil’s data privacy regulation, Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais (LGPD), and is backed by NetApp’s Ransomware Recovery Guarantee. It's the very definition of confidence built in.

As Unicamp prepares to break ground in Campinas, founder Dr. Zeferino Vaz declares, “The university should serve as a catalyst for knowledge that drives socioeconomic transformation.” His vision so clearly expressed in 1966 perfectly captures Unicamp’s numerous successes today.

The non-profit school is now Brazil’s leading research institution, contributing 15% of the nation’s total new intellectual property each year (only state-owned petroleum and gas giant Petrobras produces more). The university’s Hospital das Clínicas da Unicamp serves a region of 3.5 million, with an average of 40 surgeries and 13 births every day.

But perhaps most impressive is the impact Parque Científico e Tecnológico da Unicamp (Unicamp Science and Technology Park) makes in the world. Since its founding in 2008—and in partnership with the university’s innovation agency, INOVA—the park routinely connects the worlds of academia and the free market through a growing IP portfolio.

By the numbers:

• The R&D park manages 1,293 active patents and 212 active technology transfer agreements.
• It also registers 1,349 subsidiary companies currently doing business in Brazil and abroad, with about half located in the state of São Paulo.
• Economic contributions run the gamut, with nearly 53,000 jobs created by these companies being just one measure.

Primed for the future

Unicamp mathematicians make headlines in 2019 when they discover the world’s largest prime number to date. Having more than 23 million digits, it’s given a practical label—M77232917. The record stands until October 2024, and while it’s a fun anecdote, the achievement is also emblematic of Unicamp’s unwavering, unstoppable celebration of knowledge—its pursuit, and its application in the world beyond academia.

As it turns out, the world today is not so different than when Unicamp first opens its doors on the threshold of the modern era nearly six decades ago:

• A second Cold War looms.
• While the countries and politics they protest are different than in the 1960s, impassioned students of the counterculture still march against the established order, professors still occasionally go on strike, governments still struggle to balance budgets, and gender norms are still in the news.
• And while our exploration of space now reaches to the edges of the known universe, music (of course) still separates generations.

Meanwhile, innovations continue to improve the human condition, even as Unicamp’s master plan for its campus in Campinas steadfastly symbolizes the founding aims of the university, its Cartesian avenues of knowledge still radiating outward from the heart of its central plaza, and its pillars of engineering, the sciences, and humanities still inspiring students and professors alike.

Dr. Vaz’s vision of a better world grounded in knowledge endures.