After completing an extended pilot phase between fall 2017 and spring 2018, the DRSR mountable storage service known as Research Workspace became a full service for researchers on June 15. As those familiar with the DRSR project know, this service has been a long-anticipated addition to the suite of storage services available at NYU. Research Workspace consists of mountable storage designed to be accessed by a researcher on any of his or her local computers (or by way of a High Performance Computing account) to provide fast, reliable storage for management of research data. Researchers are able to request 2 TB of storage, with more capacity available for specialized projects requiring more significant storage in the near-to-medium term. Research Workspace is primarily aimed at users for whom cloud storage like NYU Box or NYU Drive, and local storage options such external hard drives and standalone servers, do not provide adequate performance in transfer of data or the type of robust backup and snapshots that is needed at scale for these particular projects.
Powering through the final phase of getting the full Research Workspace service off the ground was a truly collaborative effort encompassing members of NYU IT, Digital Library Technology Services, and Data Services. May and early June in particular involved a sprint to wrap up knowledge base articles, complete service level agreements, test provisioning systems, ensure cross-platform compatibility, and configure backup systems. Research Workspace joins a large ecosystem of NYU IT technologies, and it has been a rewarding experience for partners in NYU Libraries to learn about all the moving parts of standing up a new service. This collaboration between NYU IT technologists and NYU Libraries allows us to go further than we could independently, and hopefully make for a dependable and helpful resource.
Information on Research Workspace is available on its service home page at https://www.nyu.edu/life/information-technology/research-and-data-support/research-workspace.html. NYU Library’s Data Management team (https://guides.nyu.edu/data_management) will be incorporating it into its list of recommended services that it educates researchers about in its classes and consultations. And for researchers, it is hoped that managing the data storage needs of ongoing and future projects will be that much easier with Research Workspace in production.
–Nicholas Wolf