Research Archive Storage (RAS) provides large-scale storage and backup to high-density tape for infrequently accessed data. It is meant for unused, set-aside data that still needs to be stored. Any tenure-track faculty, principal investigator on a research grant, designated research center or department can purchase RAS.

No traditional backups will be made of RAS, so any deletion you perform will cause an irreversible loss of data.

How it Works

The system will store two data copies to tape once a month. The second tape copy is stored offsite for disaster-recovery purposes. The offsite copy will be rotated each month. Please keep a local copy of any data saved to RAS for at least a month.

Transfers and Sharing: RAS supports the use of Globus servers to provide high performance transfers, data sharing with anyone in the world and off-campus access. On campus, RAS is accessible from your desktop in the same manner as ResFS.

File Size: Individual files must be at least 1MB. RAS is not designed for storing a large number of small files. If you need to store many small files on RAS, use an archive protocol such as .tar or .zip along with a file compression utility such as gzip or bzip2 to bundle small files into a single, large archive file.

Quotas: There is no storage limit. You will be billed quarterly for the previous three months. If you plan to archive more than 25TB at one time, please contact us.

Retrieval: Access to data on RAS is subject to initial delays ranging from minutes to hours or even days based on the size of data, number of files and other activity on the system.

Sensitive Data: RAS is not an appropriate storage solution for sensitive data. Data on offsite tapes will be compressed but not encrypted. RAS is only appropriate for Level III data according to the Data Classification Handling Policy.

System Abuse: Excessive recalls of data may result in performance or access limitations to preserve performance and access for other users. We will contact users needing frequent recall to find a more appropriate solution for their data.