Shared storage space.. How much is available?

[rad]

How much storage space is available for resources for staff and students as storage space for all staff and/or students to see/dump work on?

 

Our RMshared/staff area is a total of 240GB, was 120GB a year ago, now its down to only 8gb free... ie loads of trash dumped no doubt.

 

Just interested as a teacher thought we should have terabytes

[michael2k6]

My last place (was 2006 when I left), we'd just bought in 2 HP 1tb NAS servers to deal with it. The place has 2200 students and about 120 staff.

The storage for the music tech and drama studios was seperate to that and into the TB's aswell.

[glennda]

For our staff share alone we have around 330gb's but across the whole network our file servers have a capacity of about 2.5tb with about 1.9 used.

[Jamo]

We have about 400gb for the staff area atm. The server is virtual so the drive has been expanded a few times with a few tb free space on the SAN.

 

One thing to mention is that its not just buying the discs its the backup of the data as well which causes the price hike for central storage compared to their drives at home!

[3s-gtech]

All separate storafe at ours for each purpose; with the upgrade to our second DFS server to bring it up to matching the first, we'll have 1.36TB of RAID 5 DFS-R for shares. That doesn't include any home areas or anything. The issue with providing massive storage is the amount of utter junk on it also massively increases, as does the size of the backups. Our staff are pretty good at keeping duplicates and junk down, and know the rules on mp3s and films!

[steve]

We have about 2Tb for all staff and student files.

 

While it doesn't sound a lot in a world where 2Tb drives are less than £200, it should be noted there is a difference between basic end user drive prices and enterprise quality drives. Enterprise drives for SANs can be many more times expensive (£400-500).

 

Also redundancy (RAID) has to be considered plus the cost of backing up that drives data (snap shots, backups, disaster recovery, shadow copies, etc.)

 

I'd estimate it's something like a ratio of 5:1 for usable space to actual drive space needed to be purchased. So for 2Tb you'll need to buy something like 10Tb. While all this doesn't need to be enterprise quality, it soon adds up.

 

So to add 2Tb more for us would cost about 2x £400 (core SAN), + 3x £200 (Backup SAN)= £1400

 

Now that's assuming your SANs / servers have spare bays and you don't need to upgrade those too......

[dhicks]

Just interested as a teacher thought we should have terabytes

 

I figure each user should have at least 8GB of their own personal storage, the same as a cheap memory stick, and you should probably have at least a couple of terabytes for teachers to store shared files on. Large amounts of storage space, along with suitible backup, are cheaply available these days:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/56599-cheapest-way-obtain-high-performance-file-server.html

[sidewinder]

While it doesn't sound a lot in a world where 2Tb drives are less than £200, it should be noted there is a difference between basic end user drive prices and enterprise quality drives.

 

That was the argument I had to use in my old place as storage (personal and shared) was through the roof...still had very little effect. From what I hear it has got even worse since I left.

 

Current school is very small, 30 odd GB at the last count - and even at that level the IT teacher is eager to keep it free of junk - fine with me!

I feel that if staff are unrestricted to begin with, they're less eager to change and reduce what is being used - whilst here, there was always quite modest amounts of storage available. That has changed now but I'd like to still keep it as low as possible

 

If storage is needed I have no problem with providing it, but I dislike it just being used as a dumping ground for huge amounts of photos etc

[irsprint84]

I just delete all thwe copyrighted stuff every so often with support from Head, just doing it now

[JonWPS]

Our RMStaff area is currently running at 59.7GB, but we also have a NAS box for multimedia resources and student hand-in which, despite telling people it isn't regularly backed up, is now up to 619GB.

[gshaw]

Very fitting topic as I've just been tidying ours up to migrate to VM servers!

 

Found around 200-300GB across the drives, most of which taken up by old photos that no-one even looks at now. I'm not going to migrate those and see if anyone shouts... if not they're going onto archive media and that's that Also had a big clear up of staff personal files being stored where they shouldn't be. Can't solve that problem with file screening as the same extensions are used by media files for resources.

 

Will get an extra 1TB from merging the drives from our old DL380 G4s into one box so that gives us a bit extra for archive \ dumping ground.

 

Easy to make a bundle of storage space but what are you doing about backups? For students cloud-based storage seems to be the way forward, if only Microsoft would add a Recycle Bin to SkyDrive it would be pretty much the ideal solution...

Edited December 12, 2011 by gshaw

[GrumbleDook]

Duplication of files has always been a big problem IME ... and trying to get staff to sort it out is a nightmare (office, teachers and support staff). Getting last accessed dates can help identifying stuff for departments to clear out.

[gshaw]

Block level dedupe at OS level would be fantastic for this but I guess there's the offset between performance and just chucking more disks at the problem (see Microsoft's current stance with Exchange 2010).

 

File level isn't that great as it only takes a single change to lose the dedupe but I'd imagine there's a lot of template Word docs, Access databases etc that all look pretty similar to each other.

 

That said the "disk is cheap" argument isn't holding true at the present time, just hope price comes back down at some point...

[brad82]

With all the Science Departments junk I dread to even look at what size ours is running at.. All I know is that with the shiny new Equilogic SAN we shan't be running out of space any time soon!

[spc-rocket]

Block level dedupe at OS level would be fantastic for this but I guess there's the offset between performance and just chucking more disks at the problem (see Microsoft's current stance with Exchange 2010).

 

File level isn't that great as it only takes a single change to lose the dedupe but I'd imagine there's a lot of template Word docs, Access databases etc that all look pretty similar to each other.

 

 

That said the "disk is cheap" argument isn't holding true at the present time, just hope price comes back down at some point...

 

Windows server 8 or what ever will be the official name for it will have deduplication built into it.

 

Ash.

[rad]

Thanks peeps still interested to hear from others.

 

Today I found 5Gb of a teachers USB Stick on the staff resource and within two folders a total of 2.5 gb of pictures by just two students. Thanks to the WinXP Picture resizer, these have been reduced.

 

Only touched the surface as not had a chance to look at it this term, but so far have got back 9gb. The Disk to tape backup on Friday takes ages, so the less data to back up the better.