For IT Coordinators

ITCs can request this service for their group through our service desk and organize its usage for their group.

Space

Each research group can get 2-5 TiB of scratch for free. Groups who need more can buy storage.

Shared Disks

Storage is organized in groups of nine disks which after redundancy and file system overhead give less space. Currently we use 24 TB disks which results in 150 TiB usable space.

Groups can buy into the shared disk pool starting at 10% and then in increments of 20% of a full disk group. We add a tenth disk to compensate for disk failures outside warranty.

The price depends on the current disk prices and capacities.

The following rules apply:

The disk space is in the shared disk pool so IOPS are shared with all other users.
Metadata storage on dedicated SSDs is provided for free.
The price is one-time, defective disks are covered by price.
Disks need to be re-bought every 5 to 7 years when we replace the infrastructure. You accept that you will pay again then or loose the storage.

Backup

Groups who have bought at least 10% of a disk set can buy the same amount or more on the scratch server to have disk to disk backup of the data.

The following rules apply:

The price is one-time, defective disks are covered by price.
If your data changes often you accept that the number of snapshots is reduced to make your data fit on the backup server or that you buy more space on the backup server.
Disks need to be re-bought every 5 to 7 years when we replace the infrastructure. You accept that you will pay again then or loose backup.

Each group starts with a single share scratch with has all available space assigned to it. Adding additional shares with individual space allocations is possible on request.

NFS and SMB

Shares are made available via NFS4 and Kerberos and SMB and are accessible from the entire ETH network with some restrictions:

NFS is not exported to Euler nodes. The scratch file service is no replacement for the high performance cluster file system of Euler.

Access

ACLs are used for access control, by default all users in your group (via LDAP {ou}-all group) have access.