New Storage Infrastructure Coming Summer 2022
Dear Community,
We are happy to announce that we will be replacing our storage infrastructure with a new and higher performance system. This upgrade is necessary because our current system is beyond its end of life and not supported by our vendors. In addition, in the past six months the current system has been experiencing frequent disk failures and performance issues resulting in unplanned downtimes and increased risk of data loss.
We expect the new storage to be available this summer. At that time, ACER staff will put both the Extreme and SABER clusters in maintenance mode to migrate your data to the new filesystem. Post migration, the new filesystem will be mounted across both clusters. ACER will still provide access to your original data on the old filesystem through the Data Transfer Node to transfer any missing files prior to eventual data deletion and shutdown of the current system. Updates to the timeline will be provided as we get more information from our vendor.
We will also revise our storage usage policies to ensure that the new system provides reliable and sustainable storage that meets the demands of our research community. These revisions may include: updating the amount of free space provided to our users, implementation of disk quotas on certain filesystems, providing additional temporary and archival storage space on the clusters, and revising our fee structure for those in need of purchasing additional storage. More information on the upcoming changes will be provided in the upcoming weeks.
Finally, an important note to the users of our Extreme cluster. The operating system on Extreme is not compatible with the new storage platform (GPFS) and therefore we will be updating the operating system to CentOS 7 when we make the switch. With this OS update, we will also improve the security of the system and the ability to use the latest software packages. Three months prior to the OS upgrade, Extreme users will be provided the opportunity to update their workflows to CentOS 7 through access to a new queue.
Thank you in advance for your cooperation. We will provide updates periodically and welcome your feedback and questions.
Best regards,
Your ACER Staff