NEWS RELEASE: DuraSpace and San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) Partner to Provide Cost-Effective Cloud Storage/Preservation Services

[Bill Branan]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Sept. 18, 2012
Contact: Carol Minton Morris, (cmmo...@duraspace.org); Jan Zverina (jzve...@sdsc.edu)
Read it online: http://bit.ly/OAPyH0

DuraSpace and San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) Partner to Provide Cost-Effective Cloud Storage and Preservation Services
DuraCloud Gives Institutions the Option to Use Academic Cloud Storage

Winchester, MA  The DuraSpace organization and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, announced today that DuraCloud http://duracloud.org and SDSC’s cloud storage services  https://cloud.sdsc.edu/hp/index.php have been fully integrated to provide additional preservation services and storage for researchers, students, academics, and industry users.

Customers now have the option of choosing the world's largest  academic cloud storage system through DuraCloud. Access to commercial cloud providers Amazon and Rackspace along with SDSC Cloud Storage are available simultaneously through a single web based platform, DuraCloud.

DuraSpace CEO Michele Kimpton explains the significance of the partnership: "SDSC is an important strategic partner for us in that they are the first academic-based production cloud offering and we envision together building an academic-based open cloud infrastructure with a layer of services provided by DuraCloud.  We see this as the first step in this direction and are thrilled."

“SDSC is pleased to deploy its OpenStack-based cloud storage service to support essential data preservation services for academic institutions and other users,” said Ron Joyce, SDSC’s associate director of IT services.  “This new partnership is a win-win for both of us. It provides SDSC with a new avenue of potential opportunities in the academic community as we look to fill a critical gap in academic data management services for institutions across the country, and gives DuraCloud expanded resources with which to grow their own customer base.”

DuraCloud and SDSC’s cloud storage combined services integration gives customers the following benefits:

• SDSC’s cloud storage is providing colleges and universities with the ability to meet institutional storage and preservation requirements in a cost-effective and sustainable manner.
• Universities can access both commercial and academic cloud storage through a single provider and web application, DuraCloud.
• Customers can have a single service agreement and contract with DuraSpace and get access to all cloud providers, including Amazon, SDSC, and RackSpace.

About SDSC Cloud Storage
SDSC’s cloud storage services (https://cloud.sdsc.edu/) provide academic and research partners with a cost-effective way to store, share, and archive data, including extremely large data sets. Utilizing the open standard cloud storage software, OpenStack, with Swift Object Storage, content is written to multiple physical storage arrays simultaneously, ensuring at least two verified copies exist on different servers at all times. Once objects are in the SDSC Cloud they are immediately available over the web to other users, the public, or just the content originator. By assigning a URL to each file or container created, SDSC’s Cloud provides a simple way to expose and share any amount of data.

About DuraCloud
DuraCloud (http://duracloud.org) is a platform that enables users to manage, preserve, and access content in the cloud, as well as utilize multiple cloud providers through a single web based dashboard. DuraCloud simplifies the task of moving copies of content into the cloud and storing them with several different providers. As a result, it eliminates the risk of storing content with a single cloud provider. On top of providing a single interface through which to replicate and manage content across multiple underlying cloud stores, DuraCloud also offers a suite of preservation and archiving services.