Duke Data Attic Is Here: September 2025
The Duke Data Attic (DDA) is a new long-term storage service designed to meet your data storage needs. Just like a house attic that allows you to store things out of the way but still available for later use, the DDA provides a project-based, self-managed, flexible place to store and share infrequently used data or data that may be reused in future research.
- No-Cost Storage Allocation: Faculty receive 2TB of storage and PhD students receive 500GB. Storage sizes are expandable at a low cost of $35 per TB per year.
- Easy Access Through the Web: The Duke Data Attic utilizes Globus, allowing you to move data in and out of the attic using a simple web interface. Data transfer is optimized for high-speed transfer between common Duke storage systems like Box and data storage for the Duke Compute Cluster.
- Long-term, Cold-Storage Archival Volume: The service provides a 6-year extendable retention period, with email reminders sent to notify you when your storage retention is nearing its end. PhD students will assign a data steward to their DDA for when the student leaves Duke.
- Data Security: The service is deployed on highly resilient Ceph based object (S3) storage. Sensitive data (including regulated and Duke clinical data) is not permitted in the Duke Data Attic, and usage must comply with IRB protocol and/or data management plans.
To learn more about how to use the Duke Data Attic in your Research Toolkits project, please check out our Data Attic Tutorial.
Improvements for the Duke Compute Cluster (DCC): We are also pleased to announce enhancements to the DCC allocations. These improvements include an expansion of computational and storage resources on the DCC for all as well as providing direct services to PhD students. The DCC is a generalized high-performance computing (HPC) resource comprised of 1263 nodes, combining over 45,000 vCPUs, 980 GPUs, and 280TB of RAM.
For more information or to schedule a time to learn more about the Duke Data Attic or other research computational or data storage options, please reach out to us at oitresearchsupport@duke.edu.
The Duke Data Attic is a service of the CDSA, a new faculty-driven initiative coordinated between the Office of Information Technology, the Duke University Libraries, and the Office for Research & Innovation. This alliance aims to respond to the ever-evolving needs of the research community and the increasing complexity of conducting, sharing, and publishing research today.
To stay up to date on CDSA initiatives and services, join our mailing list, ask a question/provide feedback or visit our website.