Art And Photography Students

[mmoseley]

Hi All! (Finally a really sunny day...out in the garden!!)

We've moved all of our students to a new server, rite and enabled quota's on the students user area!

What do you guys give your art n photography students in the way of quotas?

We worked out the art n photo kids are using like 1/2 our server space! crazy amount of space!
Kids get 300MB's quota initially, do you think this is fine? as about 100/1200 kids are over the 300mb quota!!

Cheers


Enjoy the sun!

Mart

[kmount]

Previously we used to start with 100MB and work our way up from there.

The OCR Nationals course with the audio unit is causing some grief with some users needing closer to the 300MB you speak of.

[jcollings]

Our students start with 350Mb each. Students doing graphics and DiDa are often around the 500Mb mark and some need even more. We try to be reasonable but we do ensure if a student comes in asking for more space any rubbish in their area is deleted first.

Storage doesn't over bother me as it's pretty cheap - backing it all up does though and it is an area we will have to look at soon.

[kmount]

Backing it up was our problem too as you say storage is cheap.

[mmoseley]

Backing it up was our problem too as you say storage is cheap.

This is what we're pondering over at the min, its a case of our backups are jst about coping at the min...

[dhicks]

Finally a really sunny day...out in the garden!!

Here in Alton it's been grey and cloudy all weekend...

What do you guys give your art n photography students in the way of quotas?

Me and the Trusty Assistant have just been sorting that out last week. We've reimaged each of our media suite machines and partitioned each workstation's machine in to two. Then we've added a second harddrive to each machine, giving us two spare 40GB partitions per machine. The plan is to share those two partitions from each of our 18 machines as a network-available block device (using NBDServer for Windows) and combine them in to a RAID array for the art and photography pupils to use to store photos and video footage. We'll see what performance is like, but hopefully this lot should act something like a 36-element RAID array, with performance to match. That should give us around 700GB of usable space, so I imagine each pupil will have about 10GB each for their work. If a pupil requires more storage then each machine has a eSATA connection where we can plug in an external harddrive - the smaller 2.5" ones are probably more practical to carry around, so call it another 100GB each.

--
David Hicks

[john]

As has been said, storage can be cheap but the backups are costly. We cannot afford to backup any of the Media Studies coursework (They store the Adobe Premier stuff on a seperate box) its just too costly for us to be able to back them up, they are using (around 15 students) 160GB stick that on-top of the main backups and then its a mess!! I've just bought a new server with 1.5TB storage space which were fairly cheap to buy in terms of the drives but if I stuck the users on that they would soon fill it up, but its not for them its for me mwhahahaha

[AngryTechnician]

Just checked, and of our top 20 student users, each is currently using in excess of 2GB each. Every one of them is an Art or Graphic Design student. They have a lot of photos and Maya renders.

I have to get to #92 before the usage drops below 1GB. Our mean usage (across all years, including sixth form) is currently 354.8 MB.

How can we afford this? Our student file server is mirrored, but does not have any historical backups, and we make this very clear to the students (and teachers).

[pete]

Our art and design students have a quota which works along the lines of:

"You can use the space you need, provided you tidy up after yourselves/when your project is finished".

With that and using deduplication on the backups (every 100GB > approx 65GB after deduping), we're currently not experiencing any issues re space.