Australian Stem Cell Centre Portal

The data portal was created by personnel from Griffith University, IMB, NCASCR, WEHI and QFAB to facilitate collaboration between Australian stem cell researchers. The brief was to provide a stable development and production environment to host data and link in to the QFAB Systems Biology Platform (SBP) and the portal was conceived as a DMZ host within QFAB’s established virtual infrastructure.

The host runs an enterprise-class Linux with data storage on a clustered file system to facilitate data exchange with SBP and a relatively high specification of hardware resources. Software consists of the LAMP stack and developer tools such as Python and Mercurial. Network ports are closed by default and the system runs a nightly backup script with weekly off-site transfer of tapes.