{"id":440,"date":"2015-05-13T15:59:05","date_gmt":"2015-05-13T03:59:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/?p=440"},"modified":"2015-05-13T15:59:05","modified_gmt":"2015-05-13T03:59:05","slug":"flexible-secure-and-sharable-storage-for-researchers-theta2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/2015\/05\/flexible-secure-and-sharable-storage-for-researchers-theta2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Flexible, Secure and Sharable Storage for Researchers #theta2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flexible, Secure and Sharable Storage for Researchers<\/strong> (abstract<\/a>)
\nAndrew Nielson and Stephen McGregor<\/p>\n

Talked a lot to researchers. Quarter of researchers didn’t know how much storage needed. Few needed more than 10TB. Built http:\/\/research-storage.griffith.edu.au\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Found existing services were uni-focused – hard to give access to external collaborators. Need to be competitive with cloud services. Want to let people collaborate with everyone, but not everyone<\/em>. So there’s a form that lets researchers invite other users to sign in using a uni, Google, or LinkedIn account.<\/p>\n

Needed multiple ways to share. Internal sharing – share with people by name. External sharing – provide a web URL with password protection \/ expiration date.<\/p>\n

Device support: web interface plus apps including desktop sync apps.<\/p>\n

Project spaces – you get 5GB storage by default but set up a project and storage space is unlimited. Space is a folder \/ “logical grouping of data”. When creating, have to include metadata for admin purposes (owner, project name, funder, backup contact). Instant approval and provision – don’t want to get in the way. Unless told to delete old \/ unaccessed data, just move to cheaper storage – effectively archiving off.<\/p>\n

Block level deduplication (basically store a reference to previously stored data) better than single-instancing and lower overhead than compression. Have managed to save 46% space this way. This is needed because software stores entire new version, instead of a diff. “Don’t keep backups” but do replicate\/sync between their geographically separated datacenters.<\/p>\n

Used by Sciences but also Arts\/Ed\/Law, Business, and Health.
\n30% of projects (18 researchers) unfunded – data that would otherwise be on hard drives and uni wouldn’t even know it exists.<\/p>\n

Future:
\nDeveloping and piloting more services including storage for use by instruments.
\nCurrently administrators need to be hands-on to setup service – want to automate.<\/p>\n

Q: Mandate?
\nA: If you force it people get annoyed. Providing option.<\/p>\n

Q: Funding going forward given that new data probably bigger?
\nA: Yeah… basically want to build it well, get data off hard drives, show popularity, and then write business case if\/when new space needed. Nowhere near this need yet.<\/p>\n

Audience comment that fantastic usability for researchers.
\nA: Getting feedback from researchers has helped this.<\/p>\n

Q: Any data publication service in development?
\nA: Project focused on working storage. eResearch Services department are working on a system for post-publication storage.<\/p>\n

Q: Is it accessible to computational services?
\nA: Another project in early stages working on computational needs. Data in this format isn’t ideal for putting on servers – technically possible but usually when people are doing stuff on a server they want their storage there too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flexible, Secure and Sharable Storage for Researchers (abstract) Andrew Nielson and Stephen McGregor Talked a lot to researchers. Quarter of researchers didn’t know how much storage needed. Few needed more than 10TB. Built http:\/\/research-storage.griffith.edu.au\/ Found existing services were uni-focused – hard to give access to external collaborators. Need to be competitive with cloud services. Want […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[234,267,246],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":441,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440\/revisions\/441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}