Large scale research data archiving: Training for an inconvenient technology

At small scales, storage is straightforward to afford and to use, but at large scales – from several Terabytes (TB) to many Petabytes (PB) and soon Exabytes (EB) – tradeoffs must be made between cost and convenience, and training for use of such resources needs to take such inconveniences into account. A large scale, long term (over 10 year) institutional research data storage archive is described, focusing on both hardware and software. The technology choices give rise to inconveniences, which in turn not only lead to a crucial requirement for training on the proper use of the archive, but also inform the specifics of that training, as does each individual use case.