Purpose

The service has been designed to provide safe, secure, large capacity storage to Research groups on-campus. We anticipate that data will be read occasionally and written rarely. This service is not designed as temporary storage where the data has only transient value. At this time the service cannot provide managed/curated storage or manage/track workflow and capture metadata. This is up to the individual school or research group.

The service is run on a cost-recovery basis. The cost of the service is based on funding the running and renewal of the dedicated, purpose-built infrastructure in which the University has invested and reflects the buying power we have due to our wider procurement of enterprise-class storage solutions.

Your Responsibilities for Research Data

The Economic and Social Research Council states the following in its Research Ethics Framework. This information is representative of the requirements of the majority of Research Councils:

Research organizations (RO) must comply with legislative requirements and with the requirements of data, providers. Privacy, health and safety, and intellectual property are especially likely to arise as ethical concerns in research, but all legal requirements must be met. In addition, careful consideration is needed in regard to the ethical implications that might be associated with the use of secondary data. Even where formal ethical review is not required, good research practice requires adherence to professional codes of practice and compliance with the Data Protection Act (DPA).

ROs should ensure that appropriate practical arrangements are in place to maintain the integrity and security of research data. Clear direction should be provided on where responsibilities reside in all these areas. Researchers may not realize the threat to data integrity and security presented by routinely used collection and storage methods, such as computer files on hard drives and similar devices, portable computing equipment and memory, email, and databases. Periodic audit of data storage arrangements at all levels is likely to be necessary to ensure compliance with both legal obligations and good research practice.

Cost and benefits of the service

The table below outlines the differences between the RDW Service and in-house service.

Access

Access to the Research Data Warehouse is provided via CIFS to on-campus machines. It is therefore accessible to Windows, Mac and UNIX computers. The path to your share will be in the form \\campus.ncl.ac.uk\rdw\XXX where XXX is the name of your share - this is usually named after the department or project that the share was created for.

Storage is provided as a single, unstructured shared location to a nominated member of the IT Service (NUIT). It is their responsibility to organise the structure of the data as they see fit.

User-level access lists are to be maintained by NUIT for the relevant School.

Who has access to our Research Data?

Access is determined by the manager of the share (your local Computing Officer) and will in most cases be limited to another project, team and local department members. In addition, Systems Administrators and the systems which provide the service have access via the built-in server 'Administrator and 'System' accounts.' Access for these accounts should not be changed as doing so will interfere with system backups.

Disabling Administrator access also causes more general problems for the Filestore management systems, and therefore IT Service staff may reinstate default permissions without notice.

Quotas

Storage will be provided in blocks of 1TB with a minimum share size of 1TB.

Backups and data retention

• If you have deleted a file, or made a catastrophic change by accident: Please review Recovering Data for self-service options. We can assist you in this process if help is required: contact the IT Service Desk (https://nuservice.ncl.ac.uk)

Ending Service

• Customers may end service at any time. Once a customer has left the Research Data Warehouse service, the share area will be removed and the space allocated made available to other customers. Customers are required to ensure that data on the service is available or archived elsewhere. Customers are therefore advised to plan a migration away from the service well in advance of withdrawal.

Feedback

• Help shape this service! Are we making the wrong assumptions? Should we be doing something different? Please provide feedback on this service to https://nuservice.ncl.ac.uk indicating "research storage service feedback" in the body or subject of your message.

Support

• All requests for support or advice with the Research Data Warehouse service should be logged via the IT Service Desk (https://nuservice.ncl.ac.uk)