Teachers storage space - how much is enough?!

[Paid_Peanuts]

This morning i have had a member of SLT in asking about file space and who has what allocation.

Reason he was asking is because i impose a quota of 15GB on all staff - with the exception of less than 10 staff that were already over the 15GB limit when i applied it over Christmas.

 

The staff file server is 2008 R2 sitting on VMware. The virtual machine (VM) resides on a 2TB LUN which is physically part of our SAN. An IBM DS3400, the 2TB LUN is the maximum it can be with current limitations of LUN sizing and VMware vSphere 4.

The fileserver currently has 1.6TB allocated to the machine - leaving 400GB free on the LUN for snapshots and a little room for growth. I am reluctant to eat into the 400GB too much for when we snapshot the machine or when we run VCB backup jobs which require some of the 400GB for these operations. We don’t want a case where the VM hangs because the physical LUN runs out of space - which has happened to me before when we increased the size of a VM without thinking about what space is needed etc. for snapshots and VCB jobs.

 

So the staff file server has 1.6tb drive inside and of that i have 400gb free space. With 200 permanent members of staff and numerous student teachers i don’t have enough space if everyone was to use their 15gb quota as it is.

However the member of SLT was asking why heads of faculty and special skills teachers’ couldn’t have 2-3 times that amount whilst we limit new teachers to 5gb for example.

Am i being unreasonable when i said i don’t have time to go through manage all the quotas and i also explained that some HoF and SKT have some of the smallest usage when other members of staff seem to have copied the contents of subject drives into their own H: drives! FFS!

 

I think 15GB is more than enough - oh yes, all teachers also have offline files enabled on their laptops (imagine the fun there when they have 35GB!!! in their h: drive), especially when they have access to the additional:

• Department drives which is 700GB of which 200GB free.

• Year Drives which is 160Gb of which 65GB free

• Admin drive which is 700gb shared with department drives with 200GB free.

 

 

Please tell me if i am being unreasonable as SLT don’t consider the affect it will have on backups and infrastructure. They think because they can buy another hard drive in Currys for £80 that it’s as simple here.

 

My only other option i can see at the moment is to create a second staff file server and split the home directories between the two. That’s a short term fix as that then leaves me the problem of backing it all up. I would have to increase capacity on our DPM and VEEAM server as well as run the Backup Exec job to tape all weekend and into Monday day - as this currently takes anywhere up to 30 hours as it is.

 

How do other people manage their staff file usage and do you impose a quota?

 

ARGH!

[Abe]

If you give staff too much personal space they will fill it with inappropriate stuff like their own photos, videos and music collections. Much better to have only a few gigabytes of personal storage and plenty of shared space for departmental resources that should be shared rather than each teacher keeping their own copy of everything.

 

Just my 2p!

[Steve21]

I think 15GB is more than enough - oh yes, all teachers also have offline files enabled on their laptops (imagine the fun there when they have 35GB!!! in their h: drive), especially when they have access to the additional:

 

"Personally" I think 15GB is way too much already In all honesty how many people can use 15GB of "school work" that isn't copies of files other teachers needs (aka use shared areas), downloaded videos/movies (aka shared) or illegal files I'm not saying no-one can use that much, sure there are more videos for dance/drama etc etc, but in general I don't see the need for people to have that much.

 

Just my two cents

 

Steve

[Max_Power]

We impose a 1GB limit on staff but will allocate more as required without a problem. Although looking at averages most staff have around 200MB.

 

We utilise shared areas extensively which probably helps.

 

Biggest issue with space is email IMHO - staff use it as storage and don't archive. I haven't got a problem with people having larger than life mailboxes etc, but the backups take such a long time on exchange because of the sizes I would rather educate staff on archiving than simply increasing mailbox sizes, although I have had to have several conversations because staff flag up that hotmail allows them to store something like 10GBs of mail why cant we etc.

[NikChillin]

We allocate 1GB and increase it depending on their needs to up to 10GB. (only a couple of teachers though). When queried by the HT we listed the costings of hardware required to implement an increase; this included the backup drive and larger tapes. Haven't heard anything further...

[glennda]

Ours are soft quotaed so we can monitor without blocking - some staff have 10/15gb some have very little (ta's/admin staff who use shared documents mainly) - the two balance each other to have roughly 5gb per member of staff

[elsiegee40]

We have a Media$ share for photos, video and sound files... anything found in personal drives is purged (I do warn them about a week before I do it!)

[localzuk]

We're going with 10GB here, currently running in 'soft quota' mode, but will switch to hard quotas soon.

 

10GB of data, if you use a Grandfather-Father-Son backup solution, with something like a 3 month retention ends up being 80GB of data for backups unless you have fancy deduplication stuff in place (which most of us won't). Ok, compression comes into play, so let's say it manages to halve the size, that's 40GB of backups per person at any 1 time.

 

Are your SLT happy with your need to buy that amount of storage?

[rh91uk]

We have ours set at 2.5gb a member of staff!

[Domino]

If they don't get the difference between home an school tech, explain it. at length.

 

What I'd do is book a meeting with the SLT, have a nice little PPoint with the difference in quality, impact, etc - and then drop a big number to show how much improving everything to support double your current storage to cost.

 

They'll then either balk and never mention it again - or give you the cash, in which case "woo! new infrastructure!"

 

And if you need numbers, maybe add a poll to this thread to see how much most schools give people ;-)

[Paid_Peanuts]

Good idea Domino - poll added.

[3s-gtech]

I found the key to this was a large number of specific share areas. Ther's one for photos, one for Science resources, one for Performing Arts videos etc, then a general teacher one etc. Most of the files that were kept in user areas actually needed to be shared and available, so it made sense to put space towards this. Staff have 6GB quota on their home areas, it's only that much because some had already reached that point when I set up FSRM. Average usage is about 1GB.

[CyberNerd]

 

However the member of SLT was asking why heads of faculty and special skills teachers’ couldn’t have 2-3 times that amount whilst we limit new teachers to 5gb for example.

 

Why not do that? it shouldn't take long to put them into a group and implement a group quota.

Failing this you could use a deduplication system.

[TechMonkey]

We currently give a 500mb with an increase to 1Gb to those in need. The most I think is an SMT with 2. Currently we are in dire need of more storage though (as you can see). From next september the current plan is 5GB to all staff fixed and they better have a very good reason to warrant any more.

 

I have found more and more that any space you give will just be filled with minimal management & no thought. We original just upped a users limit if they asked as we assumed it must be needed, but once we started looking we were finding massive folders of 10megapixel photos just dumped from years back, loads of personal files, duplication & no idea why this was all a bad thing. In the current situation we are trying to be as flexible as possible as we realise the limits are low but obviously we can't be that flexible as we are up against a hard limit.

 

I'd agree with the ideas of getting some quotes on some shiny new SANs & put them to management.

[mavhc]

Just say: you can have another x GB each, that'll cost me £y000 to implement, give me money.

[Paid_Peanuts]

Failing this you could use a deduplication system.

 

@CyberNerd - which deduplication would you suggest?

[CyberNerd]

@CyberNerd - which deduplication would you suggest?

 

ZFS. either buy Solaris 11 or use FreeBSD. There are plenty of guides on how to set up ZFS and samba with active directory integration, quotas and acl's online.

( Solaris 10 Samba / ZFS Configuration for example)

I wrote a quota/acl/samba without ZFS howto on the edugeek wiki - still awaiting an explanation/restoration of these wiki's)

 

I'm not sure of the academic pricing for solaris, but freeBSD is free. It's not that hard to setup if you can a) use a text editor b) read.

[localzuk]

Also, Windows 2008 R2 Storage Server has deduplication built in - we are going to be looking at this when we make our move to 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

[Paid_Peanuts]

Also, Windows 2008 R2 Storage Server has deduplication built in - we are going to be looking at this when we make our move to 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

 

Am i right in thinking you have to buy a device with storage server already installed or can it be installed onto an existing 2008 R2 server?

[localzuk]

Am i right in thinking you have to buy a device with storage server already installed or can it be installed onto an existing 2008 R2 server?

 

You either have to buy it on a device, or buy it as a specific package - it isn't an addon for normal 2k8 R2.

[AngryTechnician]

Worth noting that Windows Server 8 will have dedup as an installable role on the 'normal' editions - Storage Server as a separate edition will cease to exist.

[gshaw]

You either have to buy it on a device, or buy it as a specific package - it isn't an addon for normal 2k8 R2.

 

At least MS have seen the light on this and will have it as an OS feature in Server 8... it's one of those artificial restrictions that drives me crazy as I don't want to buy a physical storage server for a feature that's been kept back to please a couple of OEM partners /rant

 

As for storage space, have you done a Windirstat or equivalent report to find out where all the space is going? There must be a lot of multimedia in there to use up that much space so it all depends on whether it's relevant data or personal files.

 

The other argument is not to give bundles of local storage space so staff have to put it on the VLE... in an ideal world that platform would be running via a repository system so staff can search for content but that panacea still hasn't arrived in the way I think it should exist on a technical level

[localzuk]

The other argument is not to give bundles of local storage space so staff have to put it on the VLE... in an ideal world that platform would be running via a repository system so staff can search for content but that panacea still hasn't arrived in the way I think it should exist on a technical level

 

But you're just shifting your storage requirements there. From your shares to your VLE...

[gshaw]

But you're just shifting your storage requirements there. From your shares to your VLE...

 

True but at least they've got a better chance of being used rather than sitting in silos within each user's personal area, plus if people have to place them in a specific area, name the resource etc they're less likely to lob junk on there that's got little use \ relevance

[CyberNerd]

At least MS have seen the light on this and will have it as an OS feature in Server 8... it's one of those artificial restrictions that drives me crazy as I don't want to buy a physical storage server for a feature that's been kept back to please a couple of OEM partners /rant

 

I'm still at a loss as to why so many people on this forum are happy to wait, and wait, for vaporware rather than just choose the best system to do the job in the first place. Deduplication has been around for a long time, if it's something you need it is worth learning how to do it, even if that means using an unfamiliar system.

 

But you're just shifting your storage requirements there. From your shares to your VLE...

 

a distributed filesystem such as GFS would do this - enable you to have a shared drive that is part of a vle even if the webserver and CIFS server are running on septate servers, sharing hte same filesystem.