Project description
A hybrid cloud environment for research data management
The H2020 co-funded pre-commercial procurement ARCHIVER project combines multiple ICT technologies and business models in a hybrid cloud environment to deliver end-to-end archival and preservation services that are EOSC ready and cover the full research lifecycle for multiple research domains. The services are being co-designed in partnership with research clusters members: CERN, PIC/IFAE and DESY. These research-performing organisations are deploying use cases from astrophysics, high-energy physics, life sciences and photon-neutron sciences, stimulating the creation of an ecosystem for European specialist ICT companies active in data archiving and preservation, who would like to introduce new services capable of supporting the expanding needs of research communities. ARCHIVER is the only EOSC related H2020 project focussing on commercial long-term archiving and preservation services for petabyte scale datasets across multiple research domains and countries.
Objective
Data has both a value and a cost and modern research data management makes many promises in terms of capacity, scalability, ease-of-use and security. The stewardship of
research data involves not only all data-related tasks during the active lifetime of a project itself but also preparing the data and associated information for later re-use.
The period during which research data remains valuable can stretch into decades.
Currently, many research projects cannot manage their data, as the archiving and preservation services are inadequate and fall below expectations while data stewardship costs are frequently underestimated during the planning phase.
Using the PCP instrument and building on results of recent projects, ARCHIVER’s goal is to fulfil these data management promises in a multi-disciplinary environment, allowing each research group to retain ownership of their data whilst leveraging best practices, standards and economies of scale.
ARCHIVER will combine multiple ICT technologies, including extreme data-scaling, network connectivity, service inter-operability and business models, in a hybrid cloud environment to deliver end-to-end archival and preservation services that cover the full research lifecycle.
The use-cases driving the consortium’s need for research and development of innovative data preservation services will extend the preservation ecosystems of the procurers to create more dynamic solutions using a hybrid model combining on-premise capacity with external services operated by commercial suppliers that will be enhanced to comply with the OAIS (ISO 14721) series of standards.
One of the main benefits of such a hybrid approach is that it can be implemented in a way that is transparent to data producers and (re-)users. This transparency will address issues that cross discipline and national boundaries, such as findability and interoperability of datasets, as well as reduce costs.
The potential uptake for the services resulting from this proposal are many-fold, including supporting the needs of ESFRI and related research infrastructures as well as the results of short-term research projects funded at the regional, national and European-level. The European Open Science Cloud is a major European undertaking that will provide this project with a privileged engagement channel with Europe’s research communities who seek reliable and scalable solutions that satisfy the obligations of data management plans required by funding agencies.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
PCP - Pre-Commercial ProcurementCoordinator
1211 GENEVE 23
Switzerland