Research Storage


Service Overview

Research Storage is a service offered by the Office of Information Technology to support the data storage requirements of NC State’s research enterprise.  Two options are offered.

Individual Shares

A Research Storage individual share is available to each NC State faculty member for free.  This option is intended to as flexible as possible and will remain available throughout the faculty member’s employment at the university.

The standard storage capacity provided to each individual share is 2 terabytes (TB).  Additional space may be requested.  We will try to accommodate all reasonable requests for additional storage at no charge.  Significant additional space may incur an annual fee.

Project Shares

A Research Storage project share is available to each active project in the university’s Research Enterprise Data (RED) system.  This option provides dedicated storage space which may be accessed by all investigators working a specific project.  Project shares are intended to coincide with and support the corresponding research project’s lifecycle.  After a project has completed, the data stored in its project share may be retained by NC State according to the requirements of the project sponsor and/or publication journal.  We encourage all projects to develop a thorough data management plan and communicate the retention requirements to us.

The standard storage capacity provided to each project share is 2 terabytes (TB).  Modest additional data storage requirements may be accommodated at no charge. Projects having significant additional data storage requirements will incur an annual fee.  The current threshold for this is 30 TB.  In order for the fees to be eligible as direct costs on sponsored awards, all projects with significant additional data storage capacity requirements should include an “unlike circumstance” justification in the grant proposal, that is, above the normal level of everyday use required by a project.

 

How to Acquire & Configure Research Storage

Individual and project Research Storage shares may be acquired and configured using OIT’s Research Services web portal.  NC State faculty who do not already have an individual share will see an option to acquire one on both the main page and under the Research Storage menu after logging into the portal.  All NC State researchers who are listed as an investigator on an active project in the Research Enterprise Data (RED) system which has not already been allocated a project share will automatically see the option to acquire a project share on both the main page and under the Research Storage menu.

The process of acquiring an individual or project share is simple and the storage will be provisioned and ready to use within a minute.  Once provisioned, the web portal may be used to grant storage access to additional people and to specific computers.  Please visit the documentation link below for additional details.

Documentation

See OIT Research Storage documentation for more information.

Additional Storage Options

See OIT Storage Resource Summary for the different types of storage available from OIT.

Help

For additional information, please contact oit_research_storage@help.ncsu.edu.