Effective for FY2017
Purpose
This document summarizes Northwestern Information Technology (IT) research data storage
resources available to Northwestern faculty researchers. Northwestern IT provides two types of
research data storage services which may be purchased if needed through Northwestern IT.
Northwestern Box is also provided at no charge with unlimited storage and individual file size limits of
15 GB.
Northwestern IT provides centrally subsidized resources for research data. Housed at the University’s
central data centers, these resources benefit from a secure, reliable, and stable environment and are
designed to meet the storage needs of our researchers.
Purchasing Storage
To purchase data storage, the requesting researcher must be a member of the Northwestern faculty and
be able to provide a chart string for payment of the storage. If sponsored funds are used for purchase of
data storage, the faculty member is responsible for assuring the purchase is required to achieve, and is
consistent with, the purpose and aims of the grant. The faculty member will complete any necessary re-
budgeting of the sponsored project, if required, to ensure appropriate management of the funds.
Storage Specifications and Pricing
1. Research Data Storage Service
Intended to facilitate collaboration, data workflows, and meet the need for persistent storage of
large-scale research data. Provides an individual share of SMB desktop-mountable storage with
daily snapshots for user-enabled file recovery and daily replication to a separate cluster for a period
of 28 days. Users may be added through collaborate.northwestern.edu groups.
Auditing is available for the storage of most legally or contractually restricted data, such as Personal
Health Information (PHI) and Personally Identifiable Information (PII), or data that must be in
compliance with regulations such as HIPAA and FISMA.
RDSS Storage is only available to Northwestern faculty members at a cost of $137/TB annually.
Storage may be requested using the form found here:
http://www.it.northwestern.edu/secure/forms/research/storage-request.html.
2. Quest Storage
This storage is intended for data involved in simulations, processing, and/or analysis on Quest,
Northwestern’s high-performance computing cluster. Quest storage is connected over high-speed
InfiniBand fabric. Back up or snapshots is not currently offered on Quest. User home directories on
Quest are currently protected for disaster recovery only.
Quest storage may be assigned at no cost through an allocation proposal process. If additional
storage is needed, it is available to Northwestern faculty members at a cost of $355/TB for the use
of 5 years.
Installation Cycles
Research Data Storage Service and Quest Storage is expanded regularly throughout the year as needed.
If you are interested in purchasing resources, please contact:
Joseph Paris
j-paris@northwestern.edu
847-491-5365
Jackie Milhans
milhans@northwestern.edu
847-467-4592
Northwestern IT reviews storage pricing annually. Storage services pricing in this document is good
until August 31, 2017