New Project Storage (Beta Testing)

We are in the process of beta testing our new shared storage for projects within the TRE. As you may have experienced, the existing D Drive can be quite problematic for certain applications. Our goal with this work was to build an optional alternative for specific projects, with the potential to roll it out to other projects in the future. We understand that reliable project storage is fundamental to your research activities - this is why it has been so painful for us to see the issues users have been having with the existing storage, which is an integral part of the open source solution (Service Workbench) we use.

Our new storage can be enabled on a specific project, and under Windows appears as the P Drive. On Ubuntu workspaces, the storage is automatically mounted as /project.

While plenty of testing has been performed internally, there are very few projects currently enrolled in this - we are currently considering it to be in a beta testing stage. If your project has been enrolled in this, your feedback will be appreciated. In particular, we are interested in hearing about your experiences with the following:

• Is the new storage suitable for your existing research workflows? Unlike the D Drive storage, we are using a protocol natively supported by Windows.

• Is the new storage fast enough? While we can increase the throughout of the storage to ensure sufficient performance across a number of projects,

• Have you had any cases where the storage is not available after starting your workspace? This was a frequent issue with the current D Drive.

If you have any other issues while testing this storage, we’re keen to hear about those too.