New data storage resources for UIC researchers

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Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Research (ACER) is pleased to announce the availability of two new data storage resources for our UIC research community: Research Data Lake and Research Data Glacier.

These resources are tailored to meet two critical but different storage needs. Research Data Lake provides researchers with an S3-compatible storage system that is affordable, scalable, durable, and highly-available, while Research Data Glacier provides a low-cost storage solution for data that needs to be archived for several years.

Neither of these systems is currently certified to store personally-identifiable information, however, work is underway to allow these systems to store sensitive data.  They are expected to become HIPAA compliant in the near future.

Research Data Lake Heading link

Research Data Lake is a safe, reliable, enterprise-grade system for storing and managing both structured and unstructured research data. The system is located on the UIC campus and is fully owned and managed by ACER. It utilizes an implementation of the Amazon S3 object protocol that makes it ideally suited for data archiving, backing up of critical data, disaster recovery, big data analytics and machine learning.

File access is controlled through Globus, which is a high-performance data management platform designed to quickly and reliably transfer large volumes of data between systems within UIC and throughout the world.

Storage on this system may be purchased by the terabyte (TB) for a 5 year period, after which the storage can be renewed or terminated. The cost of storage is currently $22/TB/yr, but it may increase once off-site data replication is available (expected in 2024). Faculty members may also request access for their research group members to facilitate shared access of data.

More details and ordering information can be found on the Research Data Lake webpage.

This storage service provides a mechanism for researchers to meet the data retention and sharing requirements of NIH and other federal research grants.

Research Data Glacier Heading link

ACER has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the UIC University Library to provide an archival storage space to UIC faculty members for federally funded research. Research Data Glacier is hosted on Amazon’s S3 Glacier Deep Archive, which provides a low-cost storage solution for long term storage of data, in particular data that needs to be archived post-publication to meet data retention and sharing requirements of NIH and other federal research grants.

This service is integrated with the UIC library’s INDIGO repository to help facilitate the sharing of data with other researchers.

Storage on this system currently costs $12/TB/year for a minimum 7 year retention period. However, as pricing from Amazon is subject to change, the costs for this service are subject to an annual review.

More details and ordering information can be found on the Research Data Glacier webpage.

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Research Data Lake and Research Data Glacier are part of the Innovate initiative to support researchers and build a pipeline of technology innovation.