Introducing the New Campus Research Storage Pool (CRSP)

The UCI Research Cyber Infrastructure Center (RCIC) is pleased to introduce the new Campus Research Storage Pool (CRSP) service to the campus community. CRSP is a safe, reliable, enterprise-grade system for storing and managing research data.  In response to extensive surveys of the campus research community, the RCIC Executive Committee recommended and approved CRSP as a critical new service to be provided to UCI researchers.

An account with 1 Terabyte (TB) of storage has been created for each eligible UCI faculty member. Accounts may be accessed using UCINetIDs and passwords. Faculty may also request accounts for their research group members to facilitate shared access by sending email to CRSP-support@uci.edu.

CRSP is not currently certified to store personally-identifiable information that would fall under guidelines such as FERPA (e.g. student data), and HIPAA (health-care data). It should not be used to store these types of research data.

CRSP is directly accessible while on campus, and from other locations by using the campus  Virtual Private Network (VPN).  It supports multiple modes of storing and retrieving data to easily integrate into research workflows. Data is accessible via web browsers, folders on laptops, and through a file path on UCI’s high-performance computing clusters. UCI has site-licensed the popular ‘Webdrive’ application, which allows desktop folder access from Windows and MacOS PCs and mobile devices such as iOS and Android phones.

CRSP hardware is a collection of Dell storage arrays and servers distributed between two locations on campus (the OIT Data Center in Engineering Gateway and the ICS Data Center in Computer Science I). Data is instantly duplicated at both sites to ensure high data availability, network performance, and resilience in the face of equipment or network failure. IBM SpectrumScale General Parallel File System (GPFS) is the underlying scalable storage system managing the large data storage capacity (currently > 2 PetaBytes =2,000 Terabytes and expandable to ~ 8 PetaBytes). 7x24x365 active monitoring of CRSP is provided by the RCIC and ArcaStream, Inc.

Storage can be partitioned between a personal ‘home’ directory and a sharable ‘lab drive’. Faculty  can grant read/write access to their lab drive for specific users (e.g., students, post doctoral researchers, other faculty). If the no-cost 1TB is insufficient space for faculty needs, additional capacity can be purchased on a cost-recovery basis for $60 per TB/year.

For further information about CRSP go to https://rcic.uci.edu/crsp/index.html.