LCSR Disk Farm

LCSR Disk Farm

Space on the disk farm described on this page is no longer available. It began usage in February, 2000, and the last space was assigned i January, 2002. While most of the 3 year terms of purchase have expired, we are continuing to keep it in service as a courtesy while the hardware lasts and backup support is not a great inconvenience to us.
In the past, DCS researchers needing more disk space for project work arranged to purchase disks and have them installed on the faculty cluster. To meet the demand, LCSR has brought online a disk farm on which space can be purchased in units of 3GB for a period of 3 years. The cost for 3GB not backed up is $375 ($675 if backups are needed).

Requests for space should include the following information:
(Cutting and pasting the following into a request is recommended)

* It should be called: /farm/________
* How much space you need ( multiple of 3GB):
* Do you need backups:
* The cost as specified:
* The filesystem should be mountable from:
        Faculty machines [ ]         Research machines [ ]
        Grad machines [ ]            Samba (luckystar) [ ]
* The owner/group/world protections should be:
        Owner:  username: ________ protection Read [X], Write [X]
        Group: groupname: ________ protection Read [ ], Write [ ]
        World:                                    protection Read [ ], Write [ ]
* Special considerations:
* Usage reports on a daily [ ], weekly [ ], or monthly [ ]
        mailed to ________
Completed requests should be emailed to help@cs.

There are several advantages to the disk farm. Filesystems from it can be shared with multiple clusters (eg, the faculty and grad machines) without compromising security. We can keep some extra space there so when a researcher needs some space, it can be brought online immediately rather than waiting for the purchase process. And maintenance is eased when we can grow disk capacity in a planned, orderly fashion.

This space is being provided on fast wide SCSI drives from Sun. LCSR is providing this at cost of the equipment and media. The basic cost is ~$42/GB for disk space and ~$33/GB for backup media. The figures used to determine the cost are available from Rick Thomas. We are looking into alternatives which may reduce the cost without penalizing reliability.


This page last updated February 20, 2004.