Table of contents
Introduction
The Division of Information Technology (DIT) at the University of Maryland (UMD) offers a service to the campus research, academic and administrative community to provide unstructured data storage at a competitive cost. The Networked Storage Service (NSS) is a networked storage solution hosted by EMC's Isilon NAS storage arrays. EMC Isilon has been a leading provider of highly redundant and ultra-scalable data storage to many research institutions and universities.
Through a comprehensive support arrangement with EMC, we can offer data storage through NFS and SMB. Storage utilization is managed by quotas which can be adjusted by share owners through the NSS hosting dashboard. Further, we offer snapshots, replication and backups for the data stored through NSS addressing various levels of data protection requirements.
Data growth and management is a mounting concern for many departments and research labs at the UMD. Many times researchers and departments resort to storing critical, unique data on the cheapest data storage device that offers the capacity they need but with little or no technical support. Consequently, research time and resources are diverted to managing storage hardware. With redundant, enterprise-level hardware, comprehensive support and competitive pricing of NSS, DIT hopes to provide a valuable service to university departments and researchers.
NSS is only available for university research, academic and administrative departments, and affiliates. Students and student groups will not be permitted use of the NSS without a departmental sponsor who can provide a technical and administrative contact and a Driver Worktag account for charge-back.
Please continue reading to understand the requisites of the NSS and the storage and data protection solutions available.
Current NSS rates
| Service name | Service rate | As of |
|---|---|---|
| ISILON Active Tier | $.05 per GB used per Month | Legacy |
| ISILON Archive Tier | $.01 per GB used per Month | Legacy |
| ISILON Replication Tier | $.01 per GB used per Month | Legacy |
| ISILON Blended and Replicated Tier | $.018 per GB used per Month | 3/02/2020 |
Service requisites
Outlined are the requirements for use of NSS.
- When requesting a SMB share for use on Windows or Mac systems, all users who are to map the share must have accounts in the UMD's Active Directory, ad.umd.edu. Authentication and authorization through any other domain is not supported.
- NFS exports can only be exported to hosts within the campus network. NFS exports are exported via NFS 3 or NFS 4.
- Each account on the NSS should have a technical and administrative contact documented and maintained with DIT.
- A Driver Worktag account should be supplied when requesting a share or export.
- Quotas are defined for each share and export. Quotas can be managed through the hosting dashboard here: NSS Hosting Dashboard.
- Account technical contacts should be familiar with using SMB shares or NFS exports. Furthermore, technical contacts and supporting customer staff should be able to grant and remove file-system level permissions using Windows or UNIX clients as necessary.
- We recommend the use of AD groups to assign mapping privileges for a share. The membership of the AD group should be managed by the technical staff of the customer department.
Standard service policies
Outlined is the procedure for setting up service and the standard policies of NSS.
- To register for the service as a new account, visit the Networked Storage service page service page. This article provides the specific policies and procedures as outlined in the SLA.
- Complete the storage request form for either NFS storage or for SMB (Windows) based shares. You will receive confirmation for the share or export creation within two days after submitting the request.
- Usage rate for standard service is $.018 per GB used per month. All other tiers are legacy and are not orderable. This is a sample usage calculation for the active tier:
- If requesting at 3 TB share and you only use 1 TB of that share, the charge calculation is 1024 GB
.018 = $18.43 per month.
- If requesting at 3 TB share and you only use 1 TB of that share, the charge calculation is 1024 GB
- Additional standard policies of each share and export created include:
- Share snapshots are generated two times per day for each share. Snapshots are retained for two weeks, by default. Retention can be modified with a support ticket. Snapshot usage is a function of daily change for each share or export. It is figured into the occupancy rate for billing.
- Replication is now part of the standard service options. Disabling replication is not recommended and will not result in a reduced cost of the service. The data is replicated six times a day (once every four hours).
- Note that snapshots of your shares will NOT protect your data from catastrophic failure of the primary NAS cluster. Though the primary NAS cluster is engineered with a high-level of fault tolerance, DIT cannot guarantee that the system will never be subjected to a catastrophic failure. When taking all storage solutions into consideration, always consider how you would mitigate data loss in the event of a storage hardware failure. With this in mind, the default policy for all shares on the primary cluster will be to replicate share data regularly to a second replica cluster.
- Replication sends all snapshot data to a secondary cluster in another data center geographically distant from the primary cluster.
Additional service features
As of 03/02/2020, all replication will be required of all new shares. Additional optional features of the service will be added here as necessary.