Storage Now is our on-demand storage service for teams and individuals who have a requirement for additional storage.

The service provides storage space on centralised equipment housed in the IT Services Data Centres, with enterprise-class power, cooling and regular backups.

It's quick

One main difference from our existing services is that Storage Now is a self-service provision so your storage is available to use shortly after the request is made.

Once the request is received, the storage space will be made available automatically with little or no additional effort on the part of the person making the request.

It's free

Storage hardware is expensive, but University data is valuable and we want to ensure staff have access to a well-managed, efficient and reliable service. University central funding has purchased the equipment hosting the Storage Now space and therefore IT Services can provide this space to individuals and teams free at point of use.

It's flexible

Storage Now folders come in two flavours.

• User storage holds up to 100GB, with access limited to the person who made the request.
• Team storage holds up to 300GB per team, with shared access granted to a group of usercodes.

These capacity limits are fixed, but should be sufficient for most common uses. If you have a need for more space than this, it may be more appropriate to look at one of our chargeable departmental or even multi-terabyte bulk storage options. Details here.

It's everywhere

Because Storage Now is one of our own storage services, you can use it in the same ways as the rest of your storage. When your Storage Now folder is ready to use, we will send you instructions for connecting to it, including the server and folder name you will need.

On the campus network, you can connect directly to it from your Windows, Mac or Linux workstation. If you're off-campus, you can either use the University VPN to connect to the campus network and connect to the folder. You can use the MyFiles Web or MyFiles SFTP services to connect from anywhere in the world.

 

But there are some restrictions

• Business data only. As this storage is provided by the University, it is not intended for storing personal data (e.g. MP3 collections, movies etc.) Part of the request process will be a description of the purpose for which the storage is required.
• Staff and researchers only. Storage Now is currently not available for student accounts.
• Limited space. If you no longer have a requirement for the storage space any more, please let us know, then we will be able to remove your folder and allocate the space to someone else. We will be running some automatic analysis on the use of this storage. We will of course contact the person concerned before doing anything with the storage.

To request your Storage Now space, start your request in our service catalogue, here