Purdue University and EMC in 5-Year Partnership

For college students, where to put their digital stuff, including
materials developed through their academic careers, their many favorite photos,
and a multitude of other digital files, can be a problem. It’s an even bigger
problem for researchers and instructors who may have enormous data files that
need to be managed, curated and analyzed.

A new service at Purdue University,
however, called BoilerBackpack, will give students, faculty and staff 100GB of
personal storage, so everyone at Purdue will have a large amount of space to
store their digital stuff.

And that’s just the first step in a new partnership between Purdue
and EMC Corporation.

They are embarking on a five-year relationship that
will both address the issue of where students and faculty can put their digital
files, as well as develop solutions that can be adapted throughout higher
education.

"When we looked to solve our
data management and storage issues, we wanted to look well beyond current
practices and work to develop new solutions that can move science forward and
improve student success," says Gerry McCartney, CIO, faculty member of
the College of Technology at Purdue, and the Olga Oesterle England Professor of
IT. "EMC is the only corporation we
talked to that had the capability to both address our current data storage
needs and to partner with us to develop new technologies to improve data
management."

Purdue is naming EMC as one of its Foundational IT Partners, a group
that includes Intel, HP, and Cisco. Foundational IT Partners work with the
university in developing new technologies to be used in higher education and
scientific discovery.

"The Purdue partnership fits
well with EMC’s goal of transforming IT", says Pat Gelsinger, president and
COO of EMC information infrastructure products.

"The amount of digital
information in the world will grow forty-four fold this decade. And in some
academic disciplines, such as bioinformatics, datasets have become so large
that they defy the ability of conventional forms of information technology to
store, manage, analyze, and gather important insights from them,"
Gelsinger says. "EMC’s partnership
with Purdue is designed to advance new technology architectures and algorithms
to deal with the challenges of all of this Big Data."

For faculty and students at Purdue, the most visible and immediate
benefit of the agreement will be in place when they return for classes in the fall
of 2012 with the launch of the BoilerBackpack service.

The service will be similar to other popular cloud data services
which typically offer between 2GB to 7GB of free storage. Like those services,
Backpack will allow students and faculty to sync files, access those files from
any computer, and share files or folders with others. BoilerBackpack apps will
be available for Android smartphones, Apple iPhones and iPads, as well as apps
for Windows and Macintosh desktop computers.

As with the commercial services, BoilerBackpack users will be able
to purchase additional storage space if needed, and the university is exploring
ways to allow students to continue to use the service after they graduate.

"We’ll announce specific
details of the service as it launches in August, but we’re pleased to offer our
students and faculty a needed resource that they wouldn’t find at this scale on
any other campus," McCartney says.

Beyond the cloud storage service for the Purdue community, EMC and
Purdue will work together in several specific ways:

• Purdue researchers will have access to a new, on-demand massive storage
  facility.
• EMC and Purdue will jointly develop a new architecture for research data
  management and curation.
• They will work to develop new technologies to ingest, analyze,
  transfer and manage enormous research data sets, especially in the field of
  bioinformatics.
• With EMC’s assistance, Purdue will begin building a repository of all Purdue
  intellectual property.
• Research engineers and scientists from both organizations will work together on
  academic papers and presentations, as well as presentations at trade
  conferences.

The relationship is needed to address the challenges and
opportunities of using data analysis of massive data sets – so called big data
– to gain insights and forecast outcomes by both researchers and students at
Purdue. Purdue has been a leader in using data sets to improve student success
and retention with its Signals data analytics program.

"Big Data will be to the next decade
want the Internet was to the 1990s and early 2000s," McCartney says.
"Over the next ten years it will
change businesses and education in ways that we can’t imagine right now. With
this partnership we’re positioning Purdue to be a leader in these changes."

McCartney says the partnership will have benefits extending beyond
the Purdue campus.

"Our Foundational IT Partner
companies have not only committed to provide excellent products and service to
Purdue, but they have also committed to work with us to develop technologies to
speed the pace of scientific discoveries and to improve the rate of student
success in higher education," McCartney says. "EMC is exactly the kind of company we are
looking to partner with in this effort, and because we will be advancing data
science, this relationship has the potential to change every market that uses
the Internet."