NetApp storage for research

We now offer space on koko (the DCS departmental NetApp) to DCS faculty for research project usage. A faculty member may request a project qtree (filesystem) to be mounted as /koko/<project>/. Since space allocated to these qtrees is reserved (and unusable by anyone else), it will be added in increments of up to 50G, maximum. Each faculty member may request (incrementally) up to 250G. Beyond this amount, the requesting faculty member will need to forward the request with a justification to the LCSR director for approval. Very large requests may be also be subject to review by the infrastructure committee. If a qtree has excessive free space on it (that is, you've asked for much more space than you're actually using), we reserve the right to lower the allocation should space be needed elsewhere.

Snapshots: Restores on the NetApp are done from snapshots. Our default snapshot policy is to do snapshots every 4 hours (called an "hourly" snapshot). Hourly snapshots are kept for 2 days. The snapshot done at midnight is called a "nightly" snapshot. Nightly snapshots are kept for 2 weeks. And the snapshot done at midnight Sunday night (Monday morning) is called a "weekly" snapshot. Weekly snapshots are kept for 2 months. So under our default policy, there are about 30 snapshots of the filesystem from various times over a period of 2 months should a file restore be needed. If you like, you will be able to specify a different snapshot schedule for your project space.

Exports: Project space can be exported (made available for mounting) to LCSR administered machines, self-administered project lab machines, or both. NB: if you export your filesystem to both LCSR machines and lab machines, you may end up with ownership/access problems unless you coordinate your UID/GID spaces with LCSR.

So a simple request for a project qtree might look like this:

    To: help@cs
    Subject: Project space request

    Please create a project qtree to be mounted as /koko/example on
    the faculty and research clusters.  It should initially be 20G
    in size and writable by the cs-bozo group with the default
    snapshot schedule.

while a request for more project space might look like this:

    To: help@cs
    Subject: Project space request

    Please add 20G to the space allocated to /koko/example.

Requests for project space allocation are subject to space available.

Other options for space on the DCS faculty and research clusters are described here.

This page last updated September 30, 2011.