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The University Technology Office (UTO) and Fulton High Performance Computing Initiative (HPCI) are proud to announce the ASU research storage service. This service is designed to provide affordable, reliable, secure, large-scale tiered storage to all ASU researchers for day-to-day performance of research work or large-scale archives. Windows, Unix/Linux, and Macintosh clients will be supported.
What is this for? This system is designed to support storage for research data. The service can be used for archives of large datasets, digital library applications, or day-to-day use for students and researchers.
How do I access the storage? On Windows-based systems, you can access your storage as a Windows shared drive. To attach the storage to your system
- right-click on My Computer and select "Map Network Drive..."
- Place the share location we give you in the folder field.
- Then click on connect using a different user name
- For your user name write "asuad\USERNAME" and put in your password. If you have not used your asuad account before, you may need to reset your password here. Note even if you have used your ASURite password before, that's *not* the same as ASUAD (though resetting it will sync them)
- Click OK.
- If you would like this done automatically everytime you login, check the "Reconnect at logon" box.
- Click Finish.
Windows will now map the storage space as a drive. The space is now accessable like any other file on the system.
On Mac OS X systems you can access the storage through Finder.
- From the Finder menu select Go -> Connect to Server...
- In the Server Address field type "cifs://SERVERNAME/SHARENAME" using the names we give you for SERVERNAME and SHARENAME. Windows style share names come in the form \\SERVERNAME\SHARENAME.
- Click Connect
- OS X will prompt for your authenication information. Workgroup or Domain is "ASUAD", Name is your ASUAD account name, and Password is your password. Click OK when you have put this information in.
- OS X will now mount the share. You should see it in Finder or on your desktop
- To unmount the share, eject the volume.
On Linux or Unix based systems, you can access your space through Samba, or for servers in managed machine rooms via NFS. NFS mounts work normally, but some extra configuration will be needed for storage space with CIFS and NFS exports.
Samba mounts are done with the CIFS filesystem. The share will have the permissions of whoever's credentials were used to mount it. This does not work like a traditional NFS mounted system. Each user will need their own mount point and will need to supply their password at the time of the mount. The mount command is:
mount -t cifs -o username=USERNAME,workgroup=asuad //SERVERNAME/SHARENAME MOUNTPOINT
Replace USERNAME with the users's ASUAD username and change the share address we give you from \\SERVERNAME\SHARENAME to //SERVERNAME/SHARENAME.
Due to the limitation that the mount only acts as one user, each user will need their own, self-mountable, mount points. These can be setup in /etc/fstab with a line like the following for each user:
//SERVERNAME/SHARENAME /home/UNIXUSER/storage cifs username=ASUADUSERNAME,workgroup=asuad,user,noauto 0 0
Coming soon: We are looking into NFS4 based exports for unix or Linux systems outside of managed machine rooms. We are also looking into OpenAFS access for Windows, Mac or Unix clients.
What makes this reliable? All of your files will be stored on redundant disks as a protection against hardware failures. Once a day, “snapshots’ of the filesystem are made to protect against files being accidentally deleted. Finally, a full copy of the filesystem is made to a second complete storage system in another building several times a week, to protect against disasters.
What is tiered storage? The storage system is divided into two tiers; the top tier is made up of high-speed fibre-channel disk drives. The second tier consists of high capacity SATA disk drives. A storage virtualization system makes the tiers appear as a single space to the user, but transparently moves the most used files to the fastest disks, and balances loads across the many fileservers that comprise the full system
How do I get access? Contact the Fulton High Performance Computing Initiative at hpc@asu.edu or http://hpc.fulton.asu.edu
Pricing: A one time fee of $2,000 per Terabyte provides storage for 5 years.
How do CIFS/NFS shares work?The CIFS share work like any other CIFS share. Permissions are handled in the usual way. The NFS view of the share uses the CIFS permissions to grant/deny access, though the unix permissions do not look like they should. DO NOT change permissions of files through the NFS export (i.e, DO NOT use chown, chgrp, or chmod), only do that through the CIFS export. Besides permissions, NFS shares work as expected. Permission mapping is done by unix id number, so we need to setup this mapping before you can use an NFS export of your share.
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Monday November 23, 2009 
