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gregory.mccarthy
BIAC Alum
USA
26 Posts |
 Posted - Mar 15 2004 : 07:48:38 AM
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Memo to all BIAC investigators:
As most of you know, the BIAC has been participating in a pilot project initiated by the Provost that has been testing the utility of a University-wide Storage Area Network (SAN) for very large data sets. The SAN project has provided free access for many BIAC users to centrally managed disk space and tape backup. This has been a great benefit for the BIAC user community.
The SAN project is now in transition, and the IBM system (‘Bristol’) that has hosted BIAC investigator data on the SAN is being re-purposed for other uses by OIT. What will happen next has not been determined. We therefore cannot say with certainty if or when a new system will be available and whether a new system would incorporate user fees. What we do know, however, is that OIT is anxious to remove all users from the Bristol system. Many groups have already done this, but there are still many who have not.
We urge all users who have data on Bristol to copy it off to their own storage systems and then (once verifying that all data have been successfully copied) delete it from Bristol. Justin Case from OIT can help restore data that has been moved from disk to tape systems (justin.case@duke.edu). We remind users that BIAC does not own or manage Bristol, and so while we can advise during this transition, users are ultimately responsible for their own data.
This past year, several lab groups at BIAC have combined funds to purchase two large-capacity data storage systems from Network Appliance (NetApp). These NetApp filers are high performance RAID systems managed by BIAC that serve data directly to our 16-processor IBM P670 SMP system. With our growing library of P670-based analysis tools, this close arrangement of disk and processor has proven to be very efficient for processing fMRI data. We are contemplating purchasing another of these systems, and invite any users who may want to purchase a dedicated chunk of space to contact Gregory McCarthy or Francis Favorini for additional information.
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Storage Area Network - Bristol
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