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June 06, 2005
Storage Utilization
This is in response to a comment by Steve Taylor on Bill's blog.
bill - as we promote and use digital technology, we will see exponential growth in the need for speed, processing power, and memory/storage. We somehow need to project need, and try to allocate funds to expand capacity. we (students, staff, faculty) ultimately need to be able to use the tools to their fullest extent.
I have paid close attention to the amount of growth we're seeing on the campus SAN. Last year at this time we were seeing about 1 gig of growth per day, on both the student and faculty/staff drives. It was very rare to see more than a 4-5gig jump.
Today we're still seeing the same type of daily growth, but on top of that for both faculty and staff we're seeing major jumps. In the range of 40gigs. On those days it has resulted in the drive being filled. So the actual size of growth could have been greater than the drive limitation allowed for.
With the knowledge of the system we were able to make educated decisions on the amount of storage we needed. However with the "exponential growth" or the massive jumps we've seen; it would require a massive amount of storage to be made available at all times. ( $$$$$ )
UCS DOES NOT and has never been asked to police the data in user home directories. We have had to use scripts to find large files, and large changes to each of the drives to help figure out how the storage is being used, and how to catch up with the growth. So while I will agree "we (students, staff, faculty) ultimately need to be able to use the tools to their fullest extent" It is also our (students, staff, faculty) responsibility to be sure we are not mis-using the provided tools. By storing non-work related files which take up large amounts of our storage.
Posted by knabet at June 6, 2005 03:58 PM
Comments
Travis - yes I agree, monitoring is necessary as well as $$$ into future for expansion of infrastructure. It would seem that WOU is in need of a well-crafted technology / funding plan, which I know we are working on. The plan is the easy part (relatively speaking), the $$ are harder to come up with.
Posted by: Steve Taylor at June 6, 2005 05:30 PM
I completely agree. Hopefully the "We" you're referring to who is crafting the technology plan involves UCS,Faculty,Staff and Student representation.
However planning technology can be a tricky thing to do; with it changing so often. We need to have a calloborative effort to plan a roadmap. As users, continue to plan what your needs are in the classroom, office etc.. which in turn allows us to coordinate resources or tools allowing you to accomplish your goal(s). In a perfect world we wouldn't have to worry about security, money, reliability, support and the list goes on and on. Good luck to all of us.
Posted by: Travis Knabe at June 6, 2005 09:55 PM