The infrastructure manager of the National Scientific Computation Unit, João Rosa, reveals some of the most recent data regarding the service for sending and temporarily sharing large files provided by the National Scientific Computation Unit: "Currently, more than 2TB of data is transferred by Filesender every month".
How can you describe the Filesender service?
Filesender is a secure solution to send and temporarily share large files between users. It is a web application that allows authenticated users to send and temporarily store large files. The authentication of users is done through the RCTSaai service.
To whom and in what situations can it be useful?
This service is intended for the community served by institutions connected to the RCTS. The user's home institution must have a RCTSaai federated authentication. However, file sharing is possible between an RCTSaai user (not federated) and another user without any kind of authentication (whether the latter is the recipient or the sender of the file). Currently, this is a very useful solution for those situations where the file to be sent is too large to be sent by email. It also has the additional advantage of being able to indicate several recipients, being that the file upload is done only once.
Can you share some usage statistics?
Currently, more than 3000 files are transferred by Filesender per month, which corresponds on average to more than 2TB of data. These values only count the files that have been uploaded: downloading files at least doubles the indicated values.
What is the future vision for this service? What will be the next steps?
We have registered a gradual increase in the use of Filesender, both in the number of distinct users and in the recurrence of their use of the service. We will continue to invest in making this service available to the community, namely in quality improvement, with a software version update that we expect to occur this semester. On the other hand, we will also increase the hardware resources that support the service, in order to better respond to the fact that Filesender is a service with a high demand.
