The Research Data Store (RDS) provides large scale, enterprise grade storage for University of Cambridge research data associated with principal investigators. It is ideal for research groups that wish to store data on an enterprise storage platform that is optimised for performance and cost. RDS is directly available on the central HPC platforms and can be used for data processing on CSD3.
Researchers would most commonly use this service when they have large active data sets they need to access frequently. For example, this could involve data processing on or through the High Performance Computing service. As the Research Data Store provides high capacity storage and has a high bandwidth connection to all of the UIS data analysis platforms, it can perform large-scale analysis and interactive visualisation of stored data sets.
Researchers can be confident that their data integrity is ensured as they are stored on an enterprise grade platform, that consists of a disk-based storage system protected by RAID. The disk storage platform has been built with fully redundant enterprise grade storage and server components configured to support failover to increase high availability. The platform is connected to the HPC services with a specialised low latency and high throughput fabric to provide optimal performance for data processing. It is also connected via a high speed Ethernet network to the CUDN to provide fast access for transferring data in and out of the platform.
It is important to note that the platform only stores one copy of data and does not have any backup functionality. You need to ensure that the data that you store on RDS are also backed up elsewhere.
The Research Data Store is optimised for large quantities of unstructured active data that is being analysed and worked on. It is available on all of the UIS research computing and data analytics platforms through our high performance data centre network.
Other features of the Research Data Store include:
Supports SSH-based protocols (SFTP and RSYNC)
High performance access through UIS HPC service
Licences for 1, 3, or 5 years
Accessible via Windows, Mac and Linux platforms
Support available through expert storage-services team
If users run out of space at any point during their licence, they can easily add more space, the cost of which will be calculated on a pro-rata basis. For quotations and purchase options, please see our self-service portal.