Rice Enterprise Storage

The creation of Enterprise Storage at Rice is the end result of a thorough investigation into the history and uses of data storage on campus. Challenges that faced the community such as data security, scalability of storage, ease of use, and disaster recovery were recognized. Needs such as the accelerating growth of data at Rice as compared to other institutions and the lack of an institutional effort to meet the data storage requirement were discussed.

One of the main problems discovered during this process was an understanding that most departments had established their own systems and cultures for storage. The issue was that these solutions were often outdated, unsecured, poorly understood, and requiring lots of individual oversight of the process.

A campus-wide approach was needed that would overcome: 1. previous distrust of IT services, 2. security concerns associated with a new network and transfer of data from legacy systems , and 3. the technical challenges of a central storage resource which would be new to Rice.

 

Features

The end product of the process is one that understands the institutional reliance and need for centralized and secure data resources. To support this understanding the following and many other features have been implemented.

• Location:  Data access and storage resources will be located in the offsite and onsite data centers.

• Staffing:  Central resources will be managed by a core group of IT staff with distributed management by distributed IT support staff.

• Capacity:  An initial installation of 50 TB of storage based on a campus inventory with an initial scale potential of .5 Petabytes will be required.

• Equipment:  On site spares for small resource replacements and redundancy both within and across data center locations will be provided.

• Training:  Customer training in the form of online resources has been determined to be adequate due to the similarity with which the resources are to currently used resources.

• Services:  Data consolidation is key to the financial effectiveness of the resource. Service customers should not have to have data distributed over multiple systems and services, but must be able to access their data via many different mechanisms.

Goals

All of these features help to serve the following overall goals of the implementation of Enterprise Storage.

• Provide a secure, scaleable, resilient, file and block level storage infrastructure
• Provide a unified data utility for the campus
• Provide distributed access controls to data resources
• Provide a pro-active storage maintenance and management service
• Provide economies of scale that can be realized with the management and expansion of storage resources
• Provide a positive customer experience

Rice's Enterprise Storage Certification