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User story feedback on Research Facilitation. "The response from the support team was fast and we had the necessary amount of space in no time."
Summary: Matteo Carandini and Kenneth Harris contacted the facilitator in July 2017 following Geoff Dunk's (Director of Operation, Faculty of Brain Sciences) information about Research Facilitation available to researchers. The team's query was about tape storage provision for the data backup for Cortexlab. Following discussions we agreed to try out Research Data Services (RDS) for their live data, writing data from their lab system on a weekly basis. However, in late January 2018, disk failures in the team's lab meant that they had to find an immediate storage solution for all their data. We met their requirement for 230TB storage for the live data, with Eugeniu Dinu completing the workflow. Their project and accounts were set up in February. When I checked with the team in May, they did not have further queries or requirements.
Feedback
August 2018
Q1 What is the title of your research project?
Backup for Cortexlab data.
Q2 Briefly, what were the queries or requirements you contacted us research facilitators about?
We needed 230TB of storage for backing up our data.
Q3 What suggestions do you have for Research IT Service facilitators to improve on for a very similar request?
Would be great to have the network speed at 10Gb/s.Connecting via SSH to the RDS server via SSH takes you by default to the home directory of the user that is connecting. It will be good to have a “project user” which has as home directory the project folder. In this way, we could connect directly from our NAS servers to the project folder and use rsync.
We are using cifs for now, that works without extra scripting.
Q4 How far do you feel the applications / tools / services / advice we provided you with meet with your requirement?
The network speeds were too low initially but it the problem was promptly dealt with by the support team. We are very happy with this arrangement.
Q5 If you were recommended tools or services (Research Data Services, Data Safe Haven, etc.), how effective was our facilitation service in providing you information and getting your accounts?
The response from the support team was fast and we had the necessary amount of space in no time.
Q6 What differences, if any, do the recommended IT tools / services make to your research work compared to before you used such tools / services?
It is comforting to have an extra backup set of our data.