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Users of the BMRC compute cluster have twol storage options open to them, a high-performance research data file system attached to the BMRC compute cluster and a read-only 'archive' platform

Live research storage

The BMRC compute cluster uses a high-performance storage platform utilising DDN GPFS hardware. This allows multi-GB/s concurrent access to your files across the compute cluster, but does not offer any backups of your data. You should consider it to be the equivalent of the WIN hosted 'scratch' file system, although it is more resilient to hardware failure than our scratch server.

Storage at BMRC is allocated on a per-project basis, to ensure good segregation of data from other projects and is purchased directly from the BMRC team by the project lead/grant holder. The project lead should contact the BMRC team to request the creation of a project folder and the necessary access control groups.

At the time of preparation, the cost for this storage is £60 per TB pa, but please confirm with BMRC before basing any grant application on this figure as this is reviewed on a regular basis.

Backup options

As this store is not backed up you will need to take additional steps to protect important files and data.

Raw MRI/MEG scan data collected on a WIN scanner should already be curated by WIN (and XNAT) so ordinarily would not need additional protection.

If you are processing data from a third-party, then if you are confident that you can obtain the data again at a later date this would also not need backing up.

Processing scripts should be kept under some form of version control in a central resource, for example WIN's GitLab.

For meaningful derived data there are two immediate options for protecting this from damage; BMRC's archive facility and WIN hosted storage and archive facilities, but other storage options may be of use.

Taking a backup of your data to WIN's storage is as simple as using a secure file transfer program; 'scp', 'rsync' are supported options, but BMRC also supports Globus for file transfers of large datasets. Once on WINs storage you may send it to tape if desired.

BMRC also offer a charged for 'archive' facility. This is a low performance single copy/same-site storage location charged at a significantly lower rate to the high-performance storage. It is presented as a read-only storage location on the principal servers, so provides protection against accidental deletion or damage but offers no disaster protection. Contact bmrc-help@medsci.ox.ac.uk for details on charging and to request archival of data.