We have installed and are currently testing a new storage server, RAHU.

RAHU (Estonian) is a new SunFire V240 with an attached Apple Xserve RAID storage system. The Xserve RAID gives us a total of 2 terabytes of usable storage. By attaching it to a Sun server, we are able to use standard Solaris tools for operating system management and the VERITAS volume manager and filesystem for storage management.

We will be migrating user accounts from PAX to RAHU over the remainder of the semester. Prior to summer, we will be notifying people with high disk usage of their usage and our plans to enable quotas. Over the summer we will turn on quotas.

The VERITAS products will give us an extremely high performance filesystem and the ability to easily create point-in-time snapshots for backup purposes. We will be creating snapshots on a nightly basis for quick restores and backing up these snapshots on a weekly basis. Snapshots will have a maximum lifetime of two weeks. It is unclear at this point whether we will make these snapshots directly available to users to perform their own file restores, and if so, how we woudl do that.