de.NBI Cloud Storage Tübingen. A federated and georedundant solution for large scientific data

Abstract

The »German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure«, or in short »de.NBI«, is a national research infrastructure providing bioinformatics services to users in life sciences research, biomedicine and related fields. At five sites across Germany, cloud sites were established to host the bioinformatics services. In Tübingen an extension of the storage capabilites of the cloud was planned, implemented and brought into production. We here report about the motivation, requirements, design decisions and experiences which might serve as inspiration for other large scale storage endeavours in the academic domain.