The Ontario Library Research Cloud (OLRC) is a cloud storage network, initially created for the use of OCUL members. This storage network provides an alternative to commercial cloud storage providers to allow subscribers to more closely control their storage costs and maintain control of their data. This storage service utilizes industry-standard APIs and interfaces to support existing library use cases, including institutional repositories and other preservation repositories. This guide for subscribers outlines how data is structured in the OLRC, tools you can use to interact with it, and how to administer your domain.

Getting Started

There are currently five recommended tools for interacting with the OLRC, and each serves a different purpose.

Tool Name	Use Cases	Limitations	Future Use Cases
Horizon	Basic object management Container management Project management User management Changing passwords Obtaining “openrc” file for CLI	No large-object support (experimental feature now available for files up to 5GB) Unable to list containers with many objects (> 1000) Unable to download whole folders	Ameliorate the limitations
DuraCloud	Objects with increased preservation needs Uploading objects to multiple cloud storage providers	Can only write using DuraCloud API, read-only access with Swift/S3 APIs
Swift Command-Line	Everything	Steeper learning curve Not as user-friendly Can be very destructive! Use with caution!
Swift or S3 API-compatible software	Object management Container management	No project/user/permissions management But… very feature-rich when it comes to interacting with containers and objects more performant than the browser (but just as performant as the CLI)

Hardware and Software

The OLRC is built on the OpenStack software.

The OLRC storage hardware contains:

• 72 CPUs
• 384GB RAM
• 500TB of storage

The OLRC proxy nodes contain:

• 48 CPUs
• 256GB RAM