Storage Services for Faculty & Research

For faculty whose primary affiliation is with a department in the Division of Social Sciences, SSCF provides 5tb of free storage (accessible via nfs or smb/cifs) and 30 days of backups.  

For some types of work, Google Team Drives or Microsoft OneDrive may be more suitable and convenient, but for others local storage is easier to work with or may even be required depending on the type of data being held.

This storage may be used to hold PII, animal, and human subject data with IRB approval, but may not be used to hold HIPAA data.  If you have data that has other regulatory or funding agency requirements attached, please talk to us - we can usually find a way to meet the requirements if we aren’t already meeting them.

For requests made after 1/1/2019 the data will be stored on encrypted drives on both the primary and backup servers. (Older data will be migrated to encrypted storage as drives are retired and replaced.)

This storage is configured with a high level of redundancy - both the primary and backup copies can survive the failure of 3 drives (generally out of a group of 12) without data loss.  The primary copy is stored at SDSC, and the secondary copy is stored at SIO.

If additional storage is needed, the faculty member can purchase storage "bricks" in pairs, one of which will be primary storage and the other a replica at our backup/failover site.  Currently (Fall 2024), a pair of servers costs roughly $23,000 and provides about 190TB of usable primary storage.  (The servers are 2U and contain twelve 24TB drives with 3-drive redundancy for data protection.).  The servers and drives must be replaced every 5 years. There will also be a new rack and networking hosting charge at the SDSC co-location facility. The co-location monthly fee is $10/1U rack space and about $20 for 1Gb network connection (10Gb connection will be $111/month) -- $60/month for each server (2U rack space and two 1Gb network connections).

If you have more complicated needs we can work with you on things like cloud-hosting (AWS/Azure), high-performance storage from SDSC, or local storage for field research or data acquisition environments.

Please contact us to get started on any of this.