Over the last month, we’ve been asking academic staff to complete a local version of the DAF survey. Here are the anonymised results. For almost all questions, there was a comments box, which many staff used and proved very useful in understanding researchers’ specific issues.
Click on the image below to download a PDF summary of the survey, which 44 staff completed. This represents about 8% of staff on research or research/teaching contracts.
One thought I have at the moment… 50% of staff are holding up to 100GB of data right now. Among all of the comments, the requirement for better storage is repeated again and again by our researchers. If we were to provide 100GB/person to all 500+ academic staff, that’s over 50TB of online storage required, plus backups. I’m told that the university currently has 24TB of online, centrally managed storage in use, with 13TB of this backed up offsite, and 1 TB ‘archived’. Clearly introducing research data into the mix will significantly increase the amount of storage that is being managed centrally.