What we provide

There is a need to store data produced by research on computer systems which are properly managed, housed in dedicated computer rooms and backed up to protect against system failure or accidental deletion of files. IT Services will shortly launch a pilot service to provide a research data storage system which meets these requirements at an affordable cost.

What you can expect

The pilot service will provide and manage data storage systems capable of holding in excess of 100TB of research data. If the pilot is successful then it is likely to be expanded to a larger scale.

The driving principle behind the design of this system is to store large volumes of data at an affordable cost. The economies of scale allow a central system to achieve greater reliability, resilience to failure and performance than could be achieved by individual research projects installing their own systems at the same cost per TB.

What we expect

The data to be stored on this system is most likely to be results from research which needs to be retained for long periods or large data sets to be analysed over a period of time.

Service availability

The data will be available to users through standard network data access protocols such as CIFS/SAMBA for Windows clients and NFS for Linux/Unix clients. It may also be available through web protocols such as http or webdav.

The service is expected to be available 24/7 and a reasonable level of resiliency is provided to achieve this. However, it is not designed as a high availability service with replication across two physically separate computer rooms.

Support for the service is provided during normal working hours, 9.00am to 5.00pm, Mon-Fri.

Service charges

Research projects wishing to access the storage will be expected to contribute to the cost of providing this service. Details of these charges will be released as soon as they are available.

FAQs and related information

Further information will be published once the service has launched. An initial service, targeted at the requirements of three research projects is expected to launch in Autumn 2009. The service will be made more widely available once this is operating successfully.

Need further help?

Please contact the IT Service Desk in the first instance.