Project Goals and Objectives

This project’s goal is to build a Community Good, Scalable, and Distributed Storage Network Infrastructure with Long-Term Archival Capability for Research Computing. Washington University’s Enterprise Risk Management process identified big data as a strategic risk and the WUSTL Research Computing IT Governance Committee has identified research storage as its top priority per its Strategic Plan.

This is the next logical evolution of the strategic initiative to implement a robust and integrated cyber-infrastructure to facilitate knowledge sharing, increase collaboration, minimize redundancy, and capital outlays while providing a foundation for “Large Data” research.

Project Scope

This effort will leverage existing technical expertise within Research Infrastructure Services (RIS) and data management expertise of the University Library. In addition, this collaboration with representative experts in other research domains seeks to not only address the storage needs of researchers, but also deliver storage-as-a-service to address the institutional responsibilities of the University to manage data access, access and retention compliance, enforce data use policies, and appropriately fund data consumption

. The storage service will be comprised of multiple tiers to increase performance while lowering costs.