AARNet takes large files to the cloud

By Peter Dinham
Thursday, 19 November 2009 07:31

Market

The not-for profit Australian Academic and Research Network – AARNet - has managed the transfer of files of up to 55 gigabytes in customer trials of its new web-based large file transfer sevice, CloudStor, which was launched on the market today and which allows the secure electronic transfer of virtually any file type regardless of size.

AARNet CEO, Chris Hancock, said today file transfers of up to 55 gigabytes have already been proven on CloudStor and trials are currently underway for the transfer of larger files.

Developed in collaboration between AARNet and its overseas partner organisations in Norway and Ireland - UniNett and HEANet - CloudStor is a complimentary service for AARNet members, designed to facilitate the distribution of large files such as large data sets generated in a research workflow or academic presentations. 

Hancock said CloudStor is hosted on AARNet natively and allows users to “securely upload files to a central storage point from which Australian and overseas collaborators can then download the file by following simple instructions sent to them in an automatically generated email notification.”
 
According to Hancock “the ability to share information between Australian and international scientific and research communities is critical for seamless collaboration to take place.  CloudStor demonstrates the importance of a high speed network to improve the productivity of our users by enabling large file transfers to take place over AARNet’s network.”

AARNet’s, director Eresearch, Guido Aben, said, that in the past, a variety of reasons forced many of the organisation’s customers to use physical media such as hard disks or thumb drives sent through the postal service if they had to transfer large files. “That situation had to stop, and with CloudStor we believe we’re providing a compelling reason for customers to keep their hard disks at home.”

Aben says all file transfers are done over HTTP or HTTPS so there is no need for users to open additional ports on their firewall, and CloudStor allows files to be temporarily saved for downloading — multiple times if needed — before they are automatically deleted.

Endorsement of Cloud Stor has come from AARNet members involved in the initial trials, including Dr Christine Wells from the National Centre for Adult Stem Cell Research who said, “we are generating very large data files from whole-genome or whole-transcriptome sequencing, which we wanted to share with collaborators in the USA and Europe.  Until now, we have had to rely on couriering the information on external hard drives. The new AARNet application has made sharing large files a much faster, simpler process.”

And, Dr David Parsons, chief medical scientist of the Department of Respiratory and Sleep Medicine at North Adelaide’s Women’s & Children’s Hospital said, “recently while attending a conference in the United States I needed to send a large amount of image information from a collaborator for rapid assessment to my team in Australia.  Fortunately, I was able to do this through CloudStor. It has brought about greater flexibility in our approach to collaboration and information sharing with.”

AARNet is a not-for-profit company whose shareholders are 37 Australian universities and the CSIRO.