Additional Storage

Faculty members may purchase or rent additional network-attached storage for use in the Office of Research Computing.

Disclaimer

The Office of Research Computing may house and support privately-owned hardware that is intended for High Performance Computing (HPC) usage. We are not a general service provider; we are primarily a provider of HPC resources. Please do not treat the Office of Research Computing as a general systems administration group; that is not our purpose nor do we have funding for that.

The Office of Research Computing may maintain hardware for compliance reasons even if the use case doesn't otherwise fit the HPC model. Please talk to us to see if this is feasible.

Backups are NOT included.

Rent vs. Buy

If you need several hundred terabytes, you should almost certainly buy dedicated hardware. Otherwise, renting is usually best.

Storage Tiers

There are lots of performance considerations when working with storage. Performance is expensive. Management features are very useful but cost money.

We typically maintain three tiers of storage:

• high performance scratch space (Lustre file system)
• home directories
• cheaper NFS appliances

If you are buying rather than renting, we can work with vendors to tailor a solution to your needs. It does not need to fit into an existing tier.

Rental Pricing

We have set our rental pricing to be at-cost (just the cost of the hardware, not staff time). Due to various constraints, we can only rent out our high performance scratch space at this time.

We bill based on TiB, not TB. TB is what drive manufacturers specify. TiB is what the operating system usually shows you and is smaller. If you are comparing prices with other services, be sure to determine which unit is being used. If they're selling you something, it's usually TB since TB makes the price look lower (e.g. 100 TB == 90.9 TiB). We don't want to disappoint you by renting you 100 TB for $x then when you look at the operating system tools you realize you only have 90.9 TiB (which, confusingly, may say "TB" or "T" for historical reasons).

10 TiB is the minimum amount for storage rental due to the time to set up billing and adjust quotas. Very large needs (hundreds of TiB) might be better met with other approaches. Please contact us to discuss the right approach.

High performance scratch space

High performance scratch space: $57.50 per TiB per year (equivalent to $52.30 per TB per year).

For every 1 TiB of quota, you are generally allowed up to 500,000 inodes (which generally means files) but we strongly encourage you to only use 10% of that amount at most. We very, very, very strongly advise you not to make use of large numbers of files. Large file counts are extraordinarily difficult for file systems to handle and we encourage you in the strongest possible terms not to store too many files. It can cause very poor performance for you and others. Please consider storing groups of files in tar files when you're not accessing them. As a result of the very likely performance degradation that will result in high file counts, we typically set the inode quota lower by default and will work with you if it needs to be increased.

Backups are NOT included.

Cheap storage

We plan to offer a much cheaper, low performance solution later in 2020 that is intended as an "online archive" tier (really cheap and really slow, but lots of capacity). The hardware was ordered in July 2020 but it may take a few months for delivery, installation, testing, etc. before it can be made available.

Rental Terms of Use

The storage hardware itself is shared with other users. Additional space is achieved through a quota extension. Note that the rental of additional space does not entitle a user to use the storage in a disruptive manner. Some applications have very poor performance that can severely impact others. Staff may contact you about storage performance issues and require that you work with us to fix the issues. The storage of millions of files may also be an issue that needs to be fixed through the use of tar files, etc.

If payment is stopped, we reserve the right to delete your data. We will contact you prior to the removal and may allow a 30 day grace period.

Backups are NOT included.

Purchases

We can usually support large storage purchases. Please contact our director or open a support ticket to ask about this option. You must maintain the warranty on your purchase.

There are certain hardware, software, and support requirements that must be met in order for us to support a storage system. Therefore, we will not support storage systems that were purchased without our assistance and approval.

Storage purchases that we can support usually require a fair amount of capital up front, usually many tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum. Network-attached storage that you can compute against is expensive. We don't support random JBOD disk enclosures from Amazon, NewEgg, Best Buy, etc. The storage needs to have certain redundancy and management features at a minimum. Additionally, we would overburden our staff if we had to support, maintain, and monitor a bunch of small one-off solutions.

Backups are NOT included.