1. OUCS Wins £1.2 million for Cloud Project – VIDaaS

The VIDaaS Team

Some of the VIDaaS Team. From left to right - Diane West, Peter Jones, John Ireland, Michael Fraser, Stuart Lee, Asif Akram, Jon Hutchings, James Wilson, Meriel Patrick, Paul Jeffreys

OUCS has won funding of £1.2million from JISC to develop the VIDaaS Project - Virtual Infrastructure with Database as a Service.

This Project will provide a local virtual infrastructure (VI) which will interface with a national Higher Education VI – or 'cloud' – to enable the sharing of services across the whole HE sector. As a result there will be substantial cost savings through economies of scale. Oxford will also collaborate with Eduserv to develop the hybrid VI and with JANET to investigate hosting the DaaS on private VIs.

The virtual infrastructure (VI) will host a self-service ‘Database as a Service’ (DaaS) system which will give researchers a way of creating, configuring, editing and querying databases through a simple Web interface which is flexible and intuitive to use. This will help improve the efficiency of UK Higher Education research. The DaaS component is to be developed from the prototype which was created as part of OUCS’s Supporting Data Management Infrastructure for the Humanities (SUDAMIH) Project, and which is currently in use by researchers at Oxford University. Functionality will be extended to meet the common requirements of researchers beyond the humanities and to cater for different database types, in addition to the traditional relational database.

There will also be a focus on training to enable researchers to plan from the beginning of a research activity how they should manage and curate the data they generate. User support materials, courses and documentation will be developed in close collaboration with the Digital Curation Centre.

VIDaaS is a groundbreaking project which will provide researchers with the self-service database tool, the shared virtual infrastructure and the training to support their growing needs into the future.

Further information is online or contact James Wilson on 01865 213489, james.wilson AT oucs.ox.ac.uk.

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