Monash Large Research Data Store (LaRDS) History

The Monash Large Research Data Store (incorporating "e-Research SAN") was established in 2006, initially comprising two Cisco MDS9500 SAN switches and 60 TB of SATA disk, organized as two 30 TB arrays distributed across Monash’s two main data centres.

Its establishment was funded by a combination of Monash central capital, augmented by federal (ARC LIEF grants – DSIeR and DGAL projects), government grants and faculty (Medicine) and specific research programme (VHA) funds.

Two IBM 3584 robot-controlled tape libraries were installed in 2006 and have now been expanded to 2.2 PB of library capacity, expandable to higher capacities as required.

LaRDS is further described here, and is a component of the Monash Campus Grid.

LaRDS disk capacity was increased to 205 TB with the purchase of additional SATA disks in 2007, and to 400TB in 2008.

LaRDS tape capacity was increased to 1.3 PB with the purchase of additional tape media in 2007, and 1.6 PB in 2008.

A variety of application interfaces have been progressively added to LaRDS inlcuding: NFS in 2006; Novell Netware and GridFTP in 2007; and Oracle, Sakai, Confluence and Subversion  (SVN) in 2008.

LaRDS server capacity was increased in 2007 with the purchase and commissioning of the systems outlined below. These systems were further upgraded in 2008:

• Dual high-performance SGI Altix 450 master servers for LaRDS
• Dual HP Novell servers
• Dual Sun X4200 GridFTP servers
• SGI DMF Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) system. 

Related Projects

Monash Campus Grid (MCG) Programme
LaRDS forms a major foundation component of the Monash Campus Grid (MCG) facility.

Data Grid Access Layer (DGAL) LIEF Project
The DGAL project provided high performance data access and file transfer infrastructure and expansion of capacity of physically distributed data storage facilities spanning Brisbane, Canberra, and Clayton.  The DGAL project was a collaboration between Monash University, The University of Queensland and the Australian National University.  It was funded by ARC (through an ARC LIEF Grant) and the three participating universities.

Datagrid Storage Infrastructure for e-Research (DSIeR) LEIF Project
The Monash component of the DSIeR project provided further storage and archival capability to the Monash LaRDS storage facility.  The DSIeR (Distributed grid Storage infrastructure for e-Research) project was a collaboration with the University of Queensland, Australian National University and James Cook University to provision and explore the issues surrounding a national storage backbone, physically distributed across great distances, so as to meet the needs of Australian researchers.

Information Management for e-Research (IM4eR) Project
A joint sub-project of the LaRDS and MeRP projects to identify suitable data management environment/s for large research data sets, in particular digital image libraries and audio/video/multimedia digital asset management.

Medicine iBrix pilot (MiBrix) Project
A project in conjunction with the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences to explore the use of low-cost modular networked disk storage technologies, and hence gain staff familiarity with the technology, establish a pilot service and assess its suitability for wider applications.

Monash Sun Grid (MSG) Project
LaRDS storage is available for access via the Monash Sun Grid (MSG) compute grid facility and other platforms.  The MSG was established in 2005.

Victorian e-Research Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) Storage Infrastructure Project
The VeRSI Storage Infrastructure project will build a prototype of the Victorian regional layer for a future Australian national research data storage infrastructure.  Distributed data storage and access facilities will be implemented at Clayton and Parkville, in support of the VeRSI Australian Synchrotron and Life Sciences use case projects.

Shoah Foundation - Visual History Archive
The Shoah Foundation Institute collection of nearly 52,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses, in 32 languages and from 56 countries, comprises the largest visual history archive in the world.  At Monash, we have established on LaRDS a local copy of approximately 10TB of this collection, comprising all interviews recorded in Australia, plus others of interest to Monash researchers and students.