Data Storage Solutions
No Fee/For Fee Options for UVa Community Members
ITS provides several types of data storage solutions for members of the UVa community ranging from no fee disk storage to mid-tier disk storage to enterprise-grade disk storage.
"No Fee" Disk Storage
A set amount of disk storage is available at no charge to members of the university community for creating content on UVa's Web servers and for using university-wide services such as email, UVaCollab, and Home Directory. A disk quota is set for each account when it is allocated.
Individuals needing to expand their quota for these services may do so through an annual lease. Since these university-wide services use enterprise-grade disk storage, when additional storage is needed it is leased at the enterprise-grade storage rates.
Mid-Tier Disk Storage
In the fall of 2009, ITS began offering a mid-tier storage solution for individuals and groups not needing the data redundancy and ITS value-added services provided with the enterprise-grade disk storage solution. The mid-tier disk storage solution offers basic data storage that:
- Provides access to your disk storage from UNIX, Windows, and Macintosh systems.
- Uses commodity-driven storage medium to keep costs down.
- Uses real hardware arrays with hot spare drives and RAID.
- For an additional fee, provides cross-building replication (where data are periodically copied to a second storage server located in a different building from the primary file server to provide fault-tolerant storage in two different locations).
- Provides access control via MyGroups and provides authentication via eservices or NFS UNIX UID.
Mid-Tier Disk Storage Rates Effective July 1, 2010
Space is available for lease in increments of 250 gigabytes (GB). Cross-building replication is optional.
- Without cross-building replication the annual lease rates are:
$48.00/year base fee plus $0.18/GB - With cross-building replication the annual lease rates are:
$48.00/year base fee plus $0.35/GB
To request mid-tier disk storage, fill out the ITS Disk Storage Order Form.
Enterprise-Grade Disk Storage
University-wide services such as email, UVaCollab, and Home Directory use enterprise-grade disk storage, so when additional storage is needed for these services it is leased at the enterprise-grade storage rates. The enterprise-grade disk storage solution is designed for individuals and groups needing robust, fail-safe data storage that:
- Provides access to your disk storage from UNIX, Windows, and Macintosh systems.
- Is made available from a high-availability, high-performance cluster of Network Appliance file servers.
- Includes snapshots.
- Is a managed file service that uses fully redundant hardware.
- Provides cross-building replication (where data are written periodically to disks located in different buildings on-Grounds thus providing fault-tolerant storage in two different locations).
- Includes ITS-provided system administrators and value-added services.
- For an additional fee, provides daily tape backups to an off-site facility.
Enterprise-Grade Disk Storage Rates Effective July 1, 2010
Space is available for lease in increments of one gigabyte (GB) for UNIX orders and four gigabytes (GB) for Windows orders. Prices are set only to recover the cost of the file service hardware, software, maintenance, and (optional) backups.
With backup, the annual lease rates are:
$24.20/year base fee, plus:
- $6.10/GB for up to 10 GB
- $5.50/GB for the next 90 GB (up to 100)
- $5.40/GB for any additional (over 100)
Without backup, the annual lease rates are:
$24.20/year base fee, plus:
- $3.50/GB for up to 10 GB
- $3.20/GB for the next 90 GB (up to 100)
- $3.20/GB for any additional (over 100)
To request enterprise-grade disk storage, fill out the ITS Disk Storage Order Form.
Departmental or Group Enterprise-Grade Storage
Disk storage may be leased by a group. It will be set up as a separate directory (not associated with anyone's individual Home Directory) which is shared by the entire group. Such a resource could be used in various ways—for example, as a small departmental file server in lieu of the department having to manage its own file server, or as the site storage for a virtual host on one of the ITS web server clusters. Departmental or group enterprise-grade storage:
- adds permanence—it is not associated with anyone's individual Home Directory account; therefore, it is not affected if a member of the group leaves the University,
- gives access only to a selected group through individual logins and IDs,
- establishes directories that can be mapped as a network drive on an individual desktop system—for example:
- \\home2\mygroupdirectory (on Windows), or
- smb://home2.virginia.edu/mygroupdirectory (on Mac OSX)
- allows you to pick what you want “mygroupdirectory” to be named as long as it doesn’t conflict with one already established,
- gives ITS the responsibility for system administration and server maintenance.
To request a group share or Web virtual host storage, fill out the ITS Disk Storage Order Form.
