Aston University

The need

Aston University is one of the leading universities in the UK and is home to 550+ academics and researchers across more than 40 Schools and Research Groups. Each of these groups is generating large and rapidly increasing volumes of data that are valuable assets for the University.

With new funder-mandated guidelines coming into force in May 2015 from bodies such as the EPSRC, the need to provide easy and long term access to this data is driving the need for a more cost-effective solution than existing ones based on traditional spinning disk.

The University wanted to take this opportunity to provide a campus-wide long-term digital data archiving service for academic research groups that have large volumes of data, long retention periods (10+ years), and that need to comply with research funder requirements for sharing and open access to research data.

The system also needed to be centrally managed and this required the individual archiving policies for each of the groups that would be using the service for their research data sets. This would enable central IT to manage how the archive was being used and to plan for future expansion.

The solution

Data ingestion is controlled by a centrally managed Arkivum Service archive policy framework. Aston University worked with research groups to define a number of archive policies based on a range of data- specific factors. The policies provided a straightforward way to automate file ingestion that met funder-mandated requirements.

The system was initially rolled out to a number of ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) funded research projects.

The Benefits

Using centrally managed archive policies, researchers only need to drop their files into the network staging area provided by the IT department and leave the rest of the archive process to the Arkivum service. With the fully-automated archive policies now in place, Aston University IT are able to run the system largely unattended.

The policies also simplify the on-boarding of new groups and departments that require data archiving services – IT simply create new policies that meet the needs of each new group or department.

With the archive system in place, Aston are also able to advertise and deliver the service to other campus departments that require assured long-term data archiving but that didn’t have the data volumes to drive the need for a large-scale archive system. Departments such as Procurement and Finance are looking at the benefits available from the indemnity insurance backed Arkivum Service.