The research community’s need for a unified storage infrastructure has never been greater than it is today. Everyone, from small research labs to large-scale research facilities, is producing data — and where it goes matters.
Today, datasets reside on siloed systems across the world that are typically behind a restrictive firewall. They’re hard to access, have firewall-imposed external bandwidth limitations, variable policies and permissions, and if you’re really unlucky, the storage is managed by someone other than an experienced systems administrator.
If you own the data, you find yourself asking:
“Where is my data?”
“How can I share it with my collaborators?”
“Is it stored safely? What’s the retention period?”
“Wait, this costs how much? I don’t have the budget for that.”
If you need data, you find yourself asking:
“What data is available to use in my research?”
“Where is it located? Who do I contact?”
“How big is the dataset?
“How can I get access to it?”
The Open Storage Network’s goal is to provide researchers with a platform that makes it easy to store, share, transfer and find research datasets.
Read more the design goals here.