EPSRC Principles: The Tarmin-IBM Solution
Tarmin & IBM Collaborate to Facilitate the Storage & Sharing of Research Data
The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council is a UK research funding body that provides substantial government support for institutions to undertake research in a broad range of scientific disciplines. Following strict data management policies and enforcing collection of the metadata and data, the EPSRC is committed to openness and transparency, mandating that all publically funded research is available as a public good.
Challenges
Institutions are required to act in accordance with the principles set forth by the EPSRC, as a result traditional storage and data management architectures are no longer adequate. Institutions are faced with the following challenges:
- Storing and managing data so it can be easily accessed by the entire research community
- Decreasing funding and increasing in demand for student aid
- Data growth creating a challenging environment for regulation and analysis
- Data research restrictions due to limitations in the traditional systems
- Modern research methods causing an influx in system stability and performance
- Enhanced mobility causing data sprawl and information corruption
If these challenges are not addressed, institutions may be faced with sanctions, including loss of public funding by the EPSRC.
Solution
The Tarmin GridBank Data Management Platform running on IBM System X Servers and Storage with GPFS and TSM is the industry’s first purpose built data management platform designed to deliver Data Defined Storage. It transforms the way organizations manage, scale, secure, retain, search and gain value from unstructured data by uniting application, information and storage tiers into a single, integrated data centric management architecture. The Tarmin-IBM solution tightly matches the EPSRC principles and has great benefits for research and development across industries including:
- Emphasizing the value of mobility and providing researches with easy access to data
- Increased flexibility fostering greater engagement from the research community
- Reduced cost of storage and total cost of ownership
- Controlling risk through retention, disposal, protection, security and integrity of data
- Allowing for centralization of data and enhanced understanding of information