Storage Policy¶
Why quotas?¶
Quotas were put in place to help control storage resources. As the Institute continues to grow it is important to keep users quotas at a reasonable size. Quotas keep users home areas in check keeping our file systems at reasonable sizes should they be checked for consistency. Quotas also keep our backups at a reasonable size keeping our backup window small. Project quotas have also been placed on centers, programs and groups.
What are quotas?¶
Disk quotas are implemented on a per user and per group basis. Quotas have soft and hard limits. When the soft limit has been exceeded, there is a grace period of 14 days to clean up and get below the soft limit. When the grace period expires, the soft limit becomes the hard limit and disk writes will fail. The hard limit cannot be exceeded, disk writes will fail if attempting to write beyond the hard limit.
Established quotas for users¶
Users soft hard
Staff, Visitors, CAM students 5G 10G
Faculty and Postdocs 10G 20G
To check quotas, open a terminal window and issue ‘quota -s’
Example
[stew@wichita ~]$ quota -s
Disk quotas for user stew (uid 64476):
Filesystem blocks quota limit grace files quota limit grace
nfs:/oden/stew
3430M 10000M 20000M 39952 0 0
The output from the quota command above shows that user stew has used approximately 3420 MB of disk space. The quota or soft limit is 10 GB and the limit or hard quota is 20 GB. If the soft limit has been exceeded, the grace period will indicate a time period as to when the soft limit becomes the hard limit.
Checking your directory¶
To determine file and directory sizes, use the ‘du’ (disk usage) program from a terminal window. For example, from your home directory, issue
$ /usr/bin/du -sk .[!.]* * | sort -n
.
.
.
41252 bin
47576 .comsol
49692 .Spotlight-V100
52608 .googleearth
64144 .java
74364 public_html
154848 .icons
155808 .local
170848 .cache
216868 Documents
242532 .thunderbird
362884 Library
474440 proj
1219984 .mozilla
Above is an example from the last few lines produced by ‘du’, sorting files and directories by asending sizes. Appears that the .mozilla directory is consuming roughly 1.2GB of space. Looking into this directory, I noticed that my email is being cached locally. This can be fixed by unchecking ‘Message Syncronization’ in the Syncronization & Storage configuration in Thunderbird.
The ‘du’ command is a common tool that can be found on all linux distributions and Mac OS X. Another tool for linux users is baobab. It offers a graphical view of your files.
Both utilities may take some time to run depending on the number of files and size of your home space usage.
Established project quotas for groups¶
Users belonging to those groups and centers listed below are provided access to additional storage in the directories shown below. On our current fedora desktops these directories are automounted and simply can be accessed by changing directory to the appropriate location. If you feel you are not in the proper group, please submit a help request to be added to that group.
Group location
aeg /org/groups/aeg
chg /org/groups/chg
gamba /org/groups/gamba
hughes /org/groups/hughes
oden /org/groups/oden
padas /org/groups/padas
press /org/groups/press
rmoser /org/groups/rmoser
staff /org/groups/staff
Center location
ccgo /org/centers/ccgo
ccm /org/centers/ccm
ccms /org/centers/ccms
cdgc /org/centers/cdgc
clsb /org/centers/clsb
cna /org/centers/cna
csm /org/centers/csm
cvc /org/centers/cvc
pecos /org/centers/pecos
Program location
csem /org/programs/cam
visitors /org/programs/visitors
postdocs /org/programs/postdocs
An unfortunate side effect for using project quotas is the quota tool does not understand XFS project quotas. You can view the project quota in the daily usage report.
Usage Reports¶
A daily usage report file is generated and located in the directory ‘usage’ in the top of the directory tree for all groups and centers. The top of the report shows the project quota limits and usage.
Scratch areas¶
On all desktops maintained by Sysnet, there exists /workspace file system. The size of workspace is dependent upon the size of the drive installed and do not have quotas enabled. Workspace is not backed up. Users are responsible for backing up /workspace, it serves as a scratch area. Make use of your center, group, or program storage if you need to store important work. Scratch areas are wiped clean during a reinstallation or upgrade, Sysnet is not responsible for any data lost on scratch areas!
Backups¶
Backups are done nightly for all users home directories and everything below /org.
Hardware¶
In late 2020, Sysnet installed new storage hardware for users home directories and group/centers shares.
The storage is comprised of two Dell PowerEdge R740xd2 servers configured with a single processor with 8 cores and 192GB RAM. Each server has a dual ported 10BaseT NIC; link aggregated to a Cisco C9300 multigigabit switch. The switch is uplinked to the building router through a single 10Gb link. Storage on the servers is a mix of solid state drives and spinning HDD’s. The home directories reside on a raid10 set containing SSD’s while the org storage is on a raid10 set with HDD’s. Exports are served from a single host, a secondary host is configured with block replication (DRBD) in a 2-node clustered environment for resiliency. Further, communication for the block replication is on a dedicated 25Gb network, dual ported and aggregated on a separate network backbone for redundancy and performance.