Why use OSN?

In every field, data presents a challenge to researchers. Whether you need to collaborate on a dataset with colleagues across institutions, compute systems, and geographical locations, share data with the community to meet grant expectations, integrate data transfer or hosting into a research pipeline, or host data for a science gateway, the Open Storage Network (OSN) can help.

Simplify collaboration

Collaborating across institutions is critical to advance research. However, handling data across disparate infrastructure is challenging. OSN provides a platform to store collaborative data that’s not tied to one university or computing platform. Whether you work on laptops, clusters, or cloud platforms, you and your colleagues can use OSN as a central location to store and transfer research data.

Host public datasets

OSN makes it easy to add to your research community’s data collection or adhere to NSF or NIH data distribution requirements. When you create a storage bucket, you can either flag it as anonymous access for fully public read access to your data, or distribute read-only access keys to community members.

Add storage to a research pipeline

Research computing pipelines can be complex and involve multiple instruments, computers, and locations. OSN fits seamlessly into many pipeline managers, including NextFlow, SnakeMake, and MLFlow, to simplify data storage and transfer along the pipeline. If you’re not using a pipeline manager, you can integrate OSN into any script using widely-available S3 libraries.

Host data for a science gateway

OSN is ideal for hosting data to feed science gateways or web applications for research distribution or community outreach. Whether you’re deploying a Shiny app, hosting a static ArcGIS App, or building a compute gateway using Tapis, OSN can support your data needs.

OSN features

OSN provides petabytes of S3 object storage to researchers and educators through the NSF’s ACCESS program or through institution-hosted pods. Unlike a typical filesystem, S3 storage is easily sharable and accessible from any computer. OSN’s storage is a web of “pods” interconnected by national, high-performance networks. OSN features include

Data access anywhere via a RESTful interface that follows S3 conventions
Federated identity management, including through the NSF’s ACCESS program, InCommon, or commercial services.
High speed data access and transfer via national research and education networks.
Data security and integrity.

OSN User Documentation ACCESS Allocations