Comparison matrix

Feature	Research Data Storage	Research File Share	Research Cold Storage
Accessible from UIS HPC service	Y	N 1	Y
Accessible from CUDN	Y	Y 1	Y
Backup		Y	Y
Off-site backup for disaster recovery		Y	Y
Recovery point objective	N/A	1 hour	24 hours
Failover to secondary data centre		Y
Number of data copies	1	2	2
Snapshots		Y
Restore window	N/A	Up to 1 month	Up to 24 hours
Additional data protection		Y
Access methods	SFTP, RSYNC	SMB 1	SFTP, RSYNC
Minimum purchase	2TB	2TB	5TB
File Quota	512,000 per TB	N/A	100,000 per TB
Licences available	1, 3 and 5 years	1, 3 and 5 years	1, 3 and 5 years

1(1,2,3)

RFS projects can be made available as a mounted filesystem on CSD3, rather than externally via CUDN. RFS on CSD3.

Typical use case

Research Data Store	Large active data sets, frequent access, high performance – for example, data processing on HPC. It can also be used as a target for an additional copy of departmental data storage. Data are not backed up.
Research File Share	General purpose storage with fast connection to Research Computing Services and other services on the CUDN. Good for storing high-value data sets that require extra protection and are accessed frequently.
Research Cold Store	Data that do not require frequent access and can accept high latency retrieval time. Good for long term storage of non-active data sets. It can also be used as a target for an additional copy of departmental data storage.