Oasis Research Computing Happenings and News Snippets (Vol 2 - Issue 6 - June 2009)

News and information - Oasis Research Computing Group

I. Storage - All things storage at Oasis

Though not the most glamorous part of IT, it is perhaps one of the most vital. Data storage comes in all shapes and sizes these days. Long gone are the “one size fits all” solutions that may have worked 10 years ago. Today, different needs dictate the architecture of a storage infrastructure. But more importantly, how we address those needs should be the topic of focus.

Storage is storage is storage. Not true. Desktop storage differs from shared network storage. Archived data differs from on demand data. Online backups are different than point in time snapshots. At UNC, the storage needs are as diverse as the user population. And while here at Oasis, we may not provide the physical backend for some of these needs, we certainly know where to point people.

So what does oasis directly provide?

Network Share Space – We have quota space available at different levels. Default quotas for research and departmental share space is 10 gigabytes, individual faculty is 2 gig, Staff 1 gig and graduates students 500mb. This space provides point in time snap shots of data for 90 days for immediate recovery. Requests for additional space is on a case by case basis with careful need based assessment.

What about archiving and backups?

ITS provides a mass storage service for large file storage/archives (more info at http://its.unc.edu/ITS/services/6291  ). For enterprise level backups ITS offers Tivoli (TSM) (more info at http://help.unc.edu/6327 ).  For general purpose backups of desktops, Iron Mountain provides an online service that backups up desktops and laptops at low cost $108 a year for departmental machines and $120 on a UNC One expense account for personal machines (more info at http://help.unc.edu/5662). Oasis does not provide a direct backup solution for desktop/laptop or non-Oasis supported servers nor do we provide data archiving solutions. We strongly encourage the use of the shared storage we do provide for critical work data files and files change often. As well, department share space to be used for the purpose of sharing data. The space is finite and expensive therefore we do not recommend it to be used as a backup option for locally stored data.

II. VCL Update

We have built more images and the library is starting to become substantial. Instead of listing all of the apps, you can go to https://vcl.unc.edu and log on to see for yourself. Although there are apps available for anyone to use, please DO NOT relay this to our user base yet. It is still in pilot and we do not want to advertise it as production use yet. We will be rebuilding some images in the VMware space of the VCL as this is the provisioning portion of the VCL I talked about several month ago. We are moving ahead with documentation and eventually marketing.

New items that will be added to the VCL are Maple, Mathematica, Kurzweil, Solidworks, Arena and Transcad. Also, we would like to start getting an idea of other applications our researchers are using that may qualify to be added to the vcl. Please let us know.

III. Monthly Buzz Word – Data Deduplication (from webopedia)

In storage technology, deduplication essentially refers to the elimination of redundant data. In the deduplication process, duplicate data is deleted, leaving only one copy of the data to be stored. However, indexing of all data is still retained should that data ever be required. Deduplication is able to reduce the required storage capacity since only the unique data is stored. Deduplication is also written as de-duplication, and is synonymous with data reduction or commonality factoring.

IV. Citrix Happenings

Over the next year, we will be building a new citrix farm in ad.unc.edu and migrate services. It will be a more streamlined farm consolidating apps onto more powerful boxes and possibly eliminating apps no longer in use. As well, we will be leveraging ad.unc.edu. This will make the transition for our users less painful for access to those services.

V. Department of Psychology Data Migration

The Department of Psychology's client migration to ad.unc.edu was completed by Oasis Infrastructure Services. We are now working on migrating their data from 8 seperate servers into a consolidated distributed file system consisting of two servers in a high availability node that will allow for point in time recovery of files on the fly.

VI. News Snippets

1.      Computing Research that Changed the World - http://www.cra.org/CRN/articles/may09/locsymposium.html

2.      Opportunities for Researchers at Government Labs - http://www.cra.org/CRN/articles/may09/pipeline.html

3.      Citrix vies for cloud lead, anyone following? - http://news.cnet.com/8301-19413_3-10238821-240.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheWisdomofClouds

4.      This day in Computer History June 2^nd

June 2, 1996

Netscape Creates Navio to Compete with Microsoft

The Washington Post ran an article speculating that Netscape Communications Corp. might one day challenge Microsoft Corp. in a story headlined, "Inside Netscape: The Software Start-Up Is Growing So Fast It May One Day Post a Threat to Microsoft." Two years later, the two companies are embroiled in a controversy related to the Justice Department's investigation of whether Microsoft has violated antitrust laws in bundling its Internet Explorer program with its Windows operating system. Netscape's Navigator and Communicator browsers for the World Wide Web are Internet Explorer's main competition.