Storage Strategies atThe University of Iowa

May 12, 2010

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Central File Storage

•Individuals: 1-5 GB

•Departments: 1 GB per FTE

Base Entitlement

•Asynchronous replication to identical system at remote data center

4 Hour Recovery Objectives

•< 1 hour of downtime in the past year

99.97% Uptime

•33K of 37K eligible users

89% Participation

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The Effect

“One price fits all” network file storage

Lower-cost network file storage

Lowest-cost bare server storage

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Storage TiersHigh Performance Enterprise SAN

Central File Storage

Low Cost SAN

Target Users Centrally managed servers

End users or distributed servers

Distributed servers

Funding Model Centrally funded Base entitlement, pay for more

Pay for use

Monthly Price per Gigabyte

N/A $0.12 – $0.25 $0.03 – $0.14

http://its.uiowa.edu/spa/storage/

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Moving Forward

Interviewed partners,

peers

Categorized storage

Analyzing data

Storage Services Roadmap

• 10 peer institutions• 17 campus units• 2.7 petabytes of campus storage

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Campus Storage by Provider

Information Technology

Services42%

College of Engineering27%

Institute for Clinical and Translational

Science12%

College of Public Health

8%

UI Libraries4%

Other7%

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Storage by University Mission

Administration & Overhead

35%

Research51%

Teaching11%

Public Service4%

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Storage by Access Type

Backup72%

Online24%

Archive4%

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Issues

Research storage• Fragmented• Poor data protection

Backup storage• Inefficient• No central service

Archival storage• Few options• Shifts to online or

backup storage

Cost

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Possible Next Steps

Identify and promote research solutions

Build central backup service

Build, promote archival solutions

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Lessons Learned

Valuable data

Invaluable process

Built on existing

community