Research Storage administers and supports the Scholarly Data Archive (SDA) and the Research File System(RFS).  These two systems provide storage services for Indiana University researchers. Any faculty, staff or graduate student may request a SDA or RFS account. (Undergraduate students must get a faculty or staff person to sponsor an account.) 

The Scholarly Data Archive is primarily a tape based archive storage system. Currently SDA has a raw tape capacity of 5.7PB. It does have over 200TB of spinning disk that operates as a cache for files moving to or from tape. SDA is geographically distributed between the IUPUI and IUB campuses. By default, a file stored in SDA will have a copy on each campus. This protects from minor problems like tape failures to major ones like a site disaster. Each campus has an automated tape library capable of holding over 5,000 tapes and 24 high speed tape drives. SDA has an aggregate transfer rate of over 2GB per second. It is capable of storing files from about 1MB to over 5TB is size.

The Research File System is a spinning disk system with currently 30TB of total capacity. RFS can be mounted on the desktop or accessed over the web or SFTP protocol. RFS supports active editing of files and documents unlike the SDA. Files are backed up on a nightly basis from RFS. RFS has robust support for project work as well. Quota's start at 10GB for personal space and 50GB for project space.  

IU is first in implementing a geographically distributed HPSS in production and is one of the largest HPSS sites in the world. IU is also a national leader among academic institutions in high-end storage R&D.

Distributed storage at IU supports the efforts of the Indiana Genomics Initiative (INGEN) and has received financial assistance via INGEN. The Indiana Genomics Initiative (INGEN) is supported in part by Lilly Endowment, Inc. DS @ IU is also supported in part by Shared University Research grants from IBM, Inc. to Indiana University. Financial assistance is also acknowledged by the National Science Foundation to Indiana under Grant No. 0116050. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in the material presented here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).