UNSW Sydney will retire 11 legacy research storage systems and replace them with a single environment that moves data automatically between fast and cheap storage. The university has selected US storage company DDN as prime contractor after an 18-month evaluation. Melbourne-founded Arcitecta will supply the data management layer.
The project began on 1 September 2026. Equipment is due to arrive in early 2027, with the system expected to go live later that year.
It forms part of UNSW's Research Data Experience (RDE) program, a multi-year effort to overhaul how the university stores and manages research data.
UNSW has described its existing setup as legacy, siloed systems built through incremental and piecemeal development. They could not scale to expected data growth. Nor could they show how data was used, reused, retained or disposed of, according to an RDE presentation to the CAUDIT THETA 2025 conference.
That presentation set out four parts to the program. They are scalable storage, a management and reporting layer for the data lifecycle, a trusted research environment for sensitive data, and policy settings for compliance.
The DDN contract addresses the first two: the storage itself and the layer that tracks how data is managed over its life.
The new environment is designed to support research computing and AI workloads as dataset sizes grow.
Fast Where Needed, Cheap Where Not
The new environment combines DDN's EXAScaler parallel file system with Arcitecta's Mediaflux data management platform.
EXAScaler is built for high-performance computing, AI and other data-intensive work. It supports both flash and hard disk, so not every dataset has to sit on premium storage.
Data will move automatically between high-speed caches on campus and a central off-campus system. Researchers get fast access where they need it, while data that does not need flash performance can sit on lower-cost disk.
The on-premises system will also support cloud environments.
Arcitecta built a connector that captures metadata changes from EXAScaler and feeds them into Mediaflux. That links the high-performance storage to tools for organising, finding and managing the data it holds.
"Research data is only valuable when people can find it, understand it and put it to work," said Jason Lohrey, CEO of Arcitecta.
"Integrating Mediaflux with EXAScaler brings data and metadata management closer to the underlying storage infrastructure," Lohrey said.
Kevin Delane, president and chief revenue officer of DDN, said the aim was to reduce storage fragmentation. "Our partnership with UNSW is about empowering researchers to spend less time managing data and more time making discoveries," he said.
The announcement did not disclose the contract value or the system's capacity.
Universities are also under pressure on collaboration storage as Microsoft ends unlimited Microsoft 365 Education storage. Arcitecta has launched a tool to help institutions move OneDrive and SharePoint data into actively managed storage.
Mediaflux is also used by the National Film and Sound Archive, which selected it this year for its audiovisual heritage strategy.