Globus Free Trial Program

Welcome to the Globus free trial program—we’re excited to have your organization on board. On this page you’ll find lots of valuable information and see how a Globus subscription can simplify the management of your research data. By working through the list below you will learn about the many benefits of a Globus subscription, including:

  • accelerating reliable large data transfers
  • enabling sharing with external collaborators
  • automating repetitive tasks

You will also explore a variety of features for managing your Globus deployment, such as usage reports, and real-time transfer monitoring and management through a console.

Let’s get started!

1. Start here

  • Install Globus Connect Server and set up a managed endpoint: Endpoints use Globus Connect Server (GCS) to connect a file system to Globus. A managed endpoint is an endpoint with full administrative capabilities enabled. (management console, usage reports), capable of hosting shared endpoints, and for which you can receive technical support from the Globus team.

  • Install Globus Connect Personal: With Globus Connect Personal (GCP) you can share and transfer files to/from a local machine, campus server, desktop or laptop-even if it is behind a firewall.

  • Enable login with your organization’s identity provider: If your institutional identity provider is federated with InCommon/CILogon and configured to release the Research and Scholarship attributes it will automatically appear in the Globus Login Pulldown menu. If you don’t see your institution appear in the Globus app on this page, find out what’s required to add it. Now the researchers at your organization can use their institutional identities to authenticate to Globus and identify themselves within the Globus ecosystem.

  • Move some data: Go ahead and transfer files. For an initial test some tutorial endpoints are already set up

2. Understand the basics

  • Set up a guest collection and share data: Globus Guest Collections are indispensable tools for providing a method of access to your local file system to those that do not have local accounts. This gives you a way to quickly create secure data repositories and foster collaboration. Make sure you also check out an often overlooked functionality: granting the Access Manager role to other Globus users, enabling self-service management of a guest collection. Sharing from Globus guest collections allows your researchers to share data and collaborate with peers at other institutions, but unlike other methods such as setting up ftp/sftp sites, emailing large files, sending disks via courier, etc., it eliminates an administrative burden for overloaded research computing staff and provides a fast, reliable, secure—and auditable—mechanism for file sharing.
  • Learn about Endpoint roles, what they mean and how to use them: For redundancy, security and flexibility Globus allows you to assign roles on your managed endpoint to other Globus users. Administrator, Access Manager, Activity Manager and Activity Monitor roles may be delegated to others. This is especially handy for endpoints managed by a group of technical staff.
  • Set up a group: Globus groups can greatly simplify sharing with multiple people, both within and outside your organization. Groups are often used to simplify delegation of roles to multiple users, e.g., for management of Globus endpoints by multiple administrators on your team.

3. Enhance your Globus admin skills

  • Monitor activity with the management console: The management console provides an interface to monitor and manage activity on managed endpoints and is available only to subscribers. This allow an administrator (with the Activity Manager or Monitor role) to identify and troubleshoot faults that may indicate underlying infrastructure issues, and better manage your storage resources.
  • View Globus usage reports to see how researchers are using the service Subscription managers have access to usage reports that are generated monthly for your subscription. These reports can be found at the Globus guest collection named “Globus Usage Reports”. If you’re a subscription manager for your institution, you can navigate to this collection and use Globus to access the usage reports. You will see a directory with the name of your institution and the UUID of the subscription you are seeking usage reports for, e.g. “University of Chicago-9cb39bd2-eb60-11e9-8a5a-0e35e66293c2” (the subscription UUID is necessary since an institution can have multiple subscriptions). Inside this directory you will find two types of reports:
    1. A set of spreadsheets containing monthly usage summary data and charts. They provide a number of views of the activity on your Globus endpoints for the given month, and can help you compare actual usage to your subscription levels. Spreadsheets are named using the year and month as a prefix; for example, data for January 2021 would be in the file 202101_Globus_Usage_Monthly_Summary.xlsx. New reports are automatically generated at the beginning of the month, containing data for the previous month.
    2. A CSV (comma separated values) file called Globus_Usage_Transfer_Detail.csv that contains complete usage history for all your endpoints. This is useful if you want to analyze the data using your own reporting/BI tool. There is always just one copy of this file, and it is updated monthly to include the most recent file transfers to/from your endpoints.

  • Learn about performance and tuning of your endpoints: Globus Connect Server (GCS) is software that is installed on physical or virtual hardware commonly called a Data Transfer Node (DTN). Globus utilizes the GridFTP transfer protocol that can yield exceptional performance. When you set up a new endpoint, Globus will configure a set of default “network use” parameters to control performance. In most cases these defaults are optimal, but you can modify them to increase throughput, if needed. Network use parameters are listed in the Server tab of the endpoint configuration page on the Globus Web App. You can learn more about the various parameters here. Note: Data transfer speeds between DTNs are only as good as the network that connects them and the capabilities of the data transfer nodes. For questions regarding network configuration best practices and selecting hardware for DTNs we refer you to our partners at ESNet. Their Faster Data web site has tons of great information on maximizing data transfer throughput by using a Science DMZ and network tuning.

  • Enable HTTPS access to allow data downloads directly via your browser: Enable browsing, preview, and downloading of files on Globus endpoints directly within a web browser (without requiring Globus Connect Personal). Files may also be accessed by other applications that support HTTPS data access, all with full enforcement of user-specified access control.

4. Integrate Globus into your infrastructure and applications

  • Experiment with the Command Line Interface (CLI): The Globus CLI provides an interface to Globus services from the shell, and is a great way to automate simple repetitive tasks, integrate Globus commands into your existing scripts, or run ad hoc Globus commands—for those users that prefer to live on the command line. Watch an overview video, install CLI, and try running through the QuickStart Guide.
  • Learn about the Globus platform services: The Globus platform enables developers to provide robust file transfer, sharing, and search functionality within their applications and services, while leveraging identity management, single sign-on, and authorization capabilities using our APIs.
  • Explore the developer APIs: Globus offers a number of RESTful APIs including Globus Transfer, Auth, Groups, and Search, as well as a Python SDK. Also take a look at the various helper pages that can jumpstart your integration efforts.

5. Take your Globus deployment to the next level

  • Explore our premium storage connectors: Premium storage connectors enable a uniform interface for accessing, moving and sharing across a diverse set of storage systems ranging from cloud object stores to tape archives and more. Connectors are available for Google Cloud, Google Drive, Amazon S3, Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure Blob storage, DataCore (Caringo), Wasabi, Storj, Box, Quantum ActiveScale, Spectra Logic BlackPearl, HPSS, Ceph, iRODS and Hadoop HDFS.
  • Manage protected data: The High Assurance and HIPAA/BAA subscription levels allow use of Globus with data that requires additional protection, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), and controlled but unclassified data. Subscribers at these levels may identify storage systems with sensitive data that require a higher level of assurance and Globus will ensure that stricter access policies, as required by the institution, are enforced. Subscribers also have access to comprehensive documentation describing Globus operations and processes for compliance with HIPAA and NIST 800-171.

Find other Globus users at your institution

Ever wonder who else at your organization might be using Globus? You can discover this by email domain through the Globus Search functionality. If you already have a Guest Collection configured, when you get to the point where you “Add Permissions - Share With”, enter your organization’s domain in the “User name or Email” text box, for example “globus.org”. You will see a list of Globus users with an email address from this domain (if any exist).

If you don’t yet have a guest collection, you can create one on the “Globus Tutorial Endpoint 1” by following the instructions located here.

Help is at hand, if you need it

We’d like to think that Globus is really easy to use but, if you do run into an unexpected glitch, our world class support team has you covered. Your free trial subscription includes premium support—just send a note to support@globus.org.