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As mentioned, soon Grace will have an option for replicating data in Fayetteville.  However, even in this case I would not consider the copy in Fayetteville as a true backup copy.  The replication Replication is good for maintaining data that needs high availability and equivalent performance regardless of which campus it the data is accessed from.  Replication also doubles the storage cost since it reduces available storage capacity at twice the rate that non-replicated storage does.  We still recommended that researchers keep backup or archive copies of data somewhere else, even if replication is turned on.

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• Please indicate whether this is for a personal namespace (e.g. primary storage for processing data on Grace), or for a group (shared storage). 
  • For a personal namespace, please indicate
    • your name
    • your e-mail
    • your departmental affiliation
    • what your login name (not your password) and domain you will use to access ROSS's administrative interface, e.g. johndoe@hpc.uams.edu (for personal namespaces we prefer that you use your HPC username,)
  • For a group namespace, please give
    • a name and brief description for the group
    • the primary e-mail contact for the group
    • the departmental affiliation of the group
    • who will be the namespace administrators - we need
      • their names
      • their e-mail address
      • their login name (not their password) and domain e.g. janedoe@ad.uams.edu (for group namespaces we generally prefer campus Active Directory usernames (e.g. the name the namespace administrator might use to login to Outlook Mail))
      • you may ask for more than one namespace administrator
      • if all the members of a particular campus AD group should be namespace administrators, you could also just give us the name and domain of the group instead of their individual names
• Please estimate approximately how much storage you or your group intend to use in ROSS for the requested namepace, divided into local and replicated amounts.  The HPC Admins will use this information in setting the initial quotas and for capacity planning.  You will be allowed to request increases in quota if needed and space is available. 
• We would also appreciate a brief description of what you will be using the storage for.  The "what it is used for" assists us in drumming up support (and possibly dollars) for expanding the system. 

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In experiments we have notices that write times to ROSS are considerably slower than read times, and slower than many POSIX file systems.  However, read times are significantly faster than write times on ROSS.  In other words, it takes longer to store new data into ROSS than to pull existing data out of ROSS.  We also notice (as is typically of most file systems) that transfers of large objects can go significantly faster than tiny objects.  Please keep these facts in mind when planning your use of ROSS - ROSS favors reads over writes and big things over little things.

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The credentials are tied to a particular object user, who belongs in a particular namespace.  For personal namespaces, the HPC Admins already added the owner as an object user as well as the namespace administrator.  For group namespaces, the namespace administrators may add object users from to the namespace using the ECS Portal following the instructions in the "Add an Object User" section of the ECS Administration Guide.  Note that the object user names are not necessarily tied to any domain, though sometimes people add a domain-like suffix to differentiate object user names.  Although an object user name is only tied to one namespace, they need to be unique throughout all namespaces within ROSS.  A domain-like suffix linked to the namespace (e.g. "@<namespace-name>") can help insure uniqueness.

The namespace administrator can retrieve an object user's credentials by logging into the ECS Portal at https://ross.hcp.uams.edu using the namespace administrator's credentials that are tied to the namepace for the namespace administrator.  Remember, the owner of a personal namespace is their own namespace administrator, and typically logs in with their HPC credentials in the form of <user>@hpc.uams.edu.  Once in the portal, click on "Manage" in the left side menu, then click on "Users".  Make certain that the "Object Users" tab is highlighted.  The type into the "Search" box the object user name for whom you wish to retrieve credentials and click the search icon (a magnifying glass).  Find the line with the correct object user's name, and the correct namespace name.  In the "Actions" column click the "Edit" button associated with the name.  This should bring you to the object user's profile.  

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1. Many object tools have options to create and manipulate buckets, which is quite convenient, generally portable (i.e. would work on any object storage system), but are also limited.  In general, tools cannot create buckets with ECS options, such as encryption, replication and file access.  You have to use one of the other bucket creation options.  Object tools only need the object user's access credentials.  Please see the tooltools' s documentation for details.
2. The RESTful APIs, including S3, Swift, and an ECS-specific management API, can be used to create and manipulate buckets.  With the appropriate headers and parameters, depending on the API, ECS options can be enabled.  More information can be had in the ECS Data Access Guide and the ECS API Reference (hint - use the search function). 
   1. The protocol-specific S3 or Swift REST APIs need an object user's credentials, and the namespace administrator must have given appropriate permissions to the object user.
   2. The ECS 
3. Use the ECS Portal.  This is the simplest option that gives full control over bucket characteristics.  The ECS Portal can only be accessed by the namespace administrator.  (That would be you, for your personal namespace.)  he namespace administrator logs into the ECS Portal (https://ross.hpc.uams.edu) with the credentials tied to that namespace.  Details on how to use the ECS Portal to manage buckets can be found in the Buckets chapter of the ECS Administration Guide.

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