Welcome to SWITCHcoldstor!
SWITCHcoldstor provides simple long term storage for research and administrative data to researchers, lecturers and IT-services of Swiss universities and related institutions.
Data preservation and archiving can be daunting for researchers and administrations. A perspective of 5-10 years or longer can quickly build up complexity and cost. SWITCHcoldstor makes storing and retrieving data simple and cost efficient. Connected to SWITCHlan, data transfer speed supports sustainable archiving and backups and a SWITCH eduID integrated management portal enables delegation of quotas and access. SWITCHcoldstor can complement existing on-site or SWITCHengines storage solutions by providing a remote copy.
Custom-tailored for academic use cases
SWITCHcoldstor is ideal for storing data that is less intensively used e.g.
- A research project is complete but needs to support reproducibility after several years (FAIR data compliance)
- An institution wishes to support Data Management Plans as part of funding body need
- Audit or regulatory requirements mandate an immutable copy of data to be stored offsite
As data is on disk, it can be retrieved without significant delay if required and restaged in live systems.
Simple and scalable technical interface
Based on the S3 Object Storage API, SWITCHcoldstor offers the ability to access data simply and quickly from any platform. Advantages include:
- Supports any kind of data
- Simple, flat structure enables self-defined data organisation
- Ability to add custom metadata to objects
- Configurable access policies to determine how data is shared
- Versioning and lifecycle support
- REST/HTTPS interface supported by many tools and software libraries
Desirable data location
- Data located at SWITCH datacentre
- Connected to SWITCHlan
- Swiss law applies
Cost effective usage model
SWITCHcoldstor enables long term cost management for data storage. Institutions and organisations order in bulk for a multi-year period and use an administrative portal to delegate quotas and to provision S3 access to individual users and groups.
