The HPC Center runs a object storage system for archiving research data, based on the Dell EMC ECS system. The ECS system is available for use. Since the ECS system is part of the HPC universe, the HPC team currently is managing it with back end support from UAMS IT (i.e. UAMS IT runs the data center infrastructure in which it sits and the networking infrastructure needed to access it, while the HPC team manages the ECS access itself).
- Researchers who sign up for an HPC account can request a 1 TB bucket for their personal use, controlled by quotas. Send a request to the HPC Help Desk if you want a bucket.
- Any entity or person that would like quotas over 1 TB may purchase additional capacity at the rate of $0.004 per GB per month, essentially what it cost us to purchase the storage, based on a 5 year life cycle for disks and servers.
- Note that Amazon Glacier pricing also starts at $0.004/GB/month; however, Amazon charges for retrieval of data from Glacier (e.g. $0.0025 per GB for slow bulk retrieves plus $0.025 per 1,000 requests plus transfer charges out ranging from $0.00 to $0.09 per GB depending on which network the data is going to). We do not currently charge anything for transfers out, only for the storage itself.
- Until the HPC Center accounts are set up, please coordinate Robin to arrange an IDT to DBMI to pay for extended quota requests.
- Once you’ve picked the size of bucket that you want, and have arranged the financial details with Robin, one of the HPC center staff will set up a bucket and quotas for you.
- A bucket has a native format of either S3 or Swift, your choice. However either object storage API (S3 or Swift) can be used to access a bucket, subject to the limitations of the native format (cross-head support).
- On bucket creation, we can also configure a bucket for file access (in addition to object access) using either the NFS or HDFS protocol. Changing the file access option after bucket creation currently requires re-creating the bucket and copying data from old to new bucket. Note that you do not lose object access by enabling file access, but enabling file access on a bucket may have some minor impacts on object access.
- The ECS system also offers EMC-proprietary bucket formats (Atmos or CAS) which we are not actively supporting, and which do not offer cross-head support (i.e. you can’t access them with other protocols like S3 or Swift). They are there for compatibility purposes for older systems/software.
- It is also possible to enable CIFS, or SMB access, but since that goes through a secondary server, performance likely suffers, so we are not recommending it for heavy use.
- Once the HPC staff sets up the bucket, you may use the object APIs, and if you enabled file access, mount the buckets to any system inside the UAMS firewall.
- It currently is not possible to access the EMC ECS system from outside the UAMS firewall.
- Grace, the HPC, has data movers that can assist in staging data to/from Grace’s cluster storage for running HPC jobs. If you plan on using this feature, please discuss with HPC staff to get it set up for you.
- Although the EMC ECS storage pools have 12+4 error coding (i.e. redundantly stores data) to protect data against failures, there currently is no offsite backup.
- Users who need offsite backup could, for example, send backup copies to Amazon Glacier or similar systems, with the hope of never having to ever retrieve them except in dire circumstances. However, the users are responsible for the off site backup costs.
- We are looking into an option that would allow researchers to send copies of their archival data to the NFS-sponsored OURRStore project, a write once, read seldom research archive at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. If this pans out, users would only be charged for the LTO-7/8 tapes (at least 2, preferably 3). Tapes with 9 TB capacity currently run $60 to $80 each (i.e. $120 to $240 for a set of 2-3, or about $13-26 per TB unformatted). However, OURRStore will not be in production mode until late 2019, according to the current schedule.
- Users who need automatic offsite backups or better file performance can still request space on the Research NAS that UAMS IT manages (i.e. the EMC ECS system is not the only game in town).