Introducing the Elm Cold Storage Service!

Elm is Stanford Research Computing’s answer to the growing data archiving needs of the research community. Built with cutting-edge, open-source technology, Elm offers a fast, scalable, vendor-neutral and cost-efficient platform for storing large datasets that require long-term retention with infrequent access, making it ideal for archival and compliance purposes.

Today, Elm is now available for the Stanford community! We are also happy to announce that Elm storage is also available through Globus!

Elm is exposed to clients as an S3 service, but with some differences. In particular:

• When you order Elm, you order storage quota. In other words, you pay for the storage you are allowed to use, not the storage you are actually using.

• Elm prefers larger files, not smaller files. Elm has a limit of 10,000 objects (files) for every 1 TiB of storage quota. Elm support files up to 5 TiB in size; the larger the better.

• After one month, your files are moved to on-campus tape storage. Although directory listings are fast, downloads from tape are slow. You will see timeouts when moving data out of Elm, but the transfers will eventually make progress.

If you are interested in ordering Elm Cold Storage, start at University IT’s Elm Cold Storage service page.

When you are ready to access Elm through Globus, check out our Globus and Elm page for known limitations, instructions on how to create an Access key, and instructions on how to load that key in to Globus.