Open Storage Research Infrastructure (OSiRIS) is a collaboration between U-M, Wayne State University, Michigan State University and Indiana University to build a distributed, multi-institutional storage infrastructure that will allow researchers at any of our three campuses to read, write, manage and share large amounts of data directly from their computing facility locations on each campus.

By providing a single data infrastructure that supports computational access on the data “in-place,” OSiRIS meets many of the data-intensive and collaboration challenges faced by our research communities and enable these communities to easily undertake research collaborations beyond the border of their own Universities.

OSiRIS will use commercial off-the-shelf hardware coupled with CEPH software to build a high performance software-defined storage system. The system is composed of a number of building-block components: storage head- nodes with SSDs + 60-disk SAS shelf, RHEV cluster (2-hosts), Globus Connect servers, a PERFSONAR network monitoring node and reliable, OpenFlow capable switches.

OSiRIS will deploy a software-defined storage (e.g., commodity hardware with storage logic abstracted into a software layer) service for our universities using the CEPH Storage Cluster as the primary means of organizing the storage hardware required.

OSiRIS is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation; the Principal Investigator is Shawn McKee, Research Scientist in the Department of Physics and the Director of the Center for Network and Storage-Enabled Collaborative Computational Science (CNSECCS). CNSECCS and OSiRIS are operated under the auspices of the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE).