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Date

2014-05-28

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ABSTRACT

In the era of Big Data, research productivity can be highly sensitive to the availability of large scale, long term archival storage. Unfortunately, many mass storage systems are prohibitively expensive at scales appropriate for individual institutions rather than for national centers. Furthermore, a key issue is the set of circumstances under which researchers can, and are willing to, adopt a centralized technology that, in a pure cost recovery model, might be, or might appear to be, more expensive than what the research teams could build on their own. This paper examines a business model that addresses these concerns in a comprehensive manner, distributing the costs among a funding agency, the institution and the research teams, thereby reducing the challenges faced by each.

Categories and Subject Descriptors

B.3.2 [Design Styles]: Mass storage

General Terms

Design, Economics, Reliability

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XSEDE '14, July 13 - 18 2014, Atlanta, GA, USA

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ACM 978-1-4503-2893-7/14/07…$15.00. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2616498.2616548

Keywords

Archival storage, mass store, business model

Description

1. INTRODUCTION In the era of Big Data, and especially as research data management requirements are tightening, research productivity in many disciplines can be highly sensitive to the availability of large scale, long term storage sufficient to contain the many and varied datasets produced and/or consumed by research teams. At the University of Oklahoma (OU), the OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (OSCER), a division of OU Information Technology (IT), has been providing large scale archival storage to a growing population of researchers. This has been accomplished via a resource named the Oklahoma PetaStore, funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant (see Acknowledgements) and consisting of disk and tape hardware, software and media. By adopting an unusual business model, OSCER has made very large scale, long term storage available to researchers, at pricing substantially lower than could be accomplished on their own, and with management provided by IT professionals rather than by research team members (for example, graduate students).

Keywords

Computer Science.

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Notes

Sponsorship