From rea at sr.unh.edu Tue Jan 8 18:15:39 2019 From: rea at sr.unh.edu (Robert E. Anderson) Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2019 18:15:39 -0500 Subject: [premise-users] Premise HPC Storage Transition In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4745931.F1EzaAoXkT@q.sr.unh.edu> As you already know, premise user data is not backed up. For almost three years premise data was stored on a resilient Lustre storage appliance. Unfortunately extending the maintenance contract on this Lustre appliance is prohibitively expensive, and our existing Lustre maintenance support expires at the end of January. In three years we have had four hardware failures, all of which resulted in no data loss or downtime. A replacement storage solution has been ordered and will arrive in the next few weeks. After installation and testing, we plan to integrate the new "BeeGFS on ZFS" storage into premise and transition off of the Lustre device. Due to the time involved for delivery, testing, and data migration, there will be a time window where the lustre hardware will run without a support contract. We do not expect this to be an issue but there will be a higher potential for data loss during the month of February. Our existing Lustre appliance is both disk and node fault tolerant, so it takes multiple failures before any data is lost. RCC suggests that you review your premise data storage to ensure your critical data is replicated elsewhere (not solely stored on premise). While reviewing your premise data it would greatly speed up our transition if you could clean up any unnecessary data. This is a best practice we should all be doing periodically, but now is particularly good time to unsure that your critical data is safe. Once the new storage hardware has been tested RCC will schedule a day to make the official switch from Lustre to BeeGFS storage. The transition will likely occur sometime in February and be aligned with other datacenter work to minimize the number of interruptions. Please ask you have questions or concerns. Thanks for your support and cleanup efforts. -- -------------------------------------------------- Robert E. Anderson -- (603) 862-3489 Associate Director -- UNH Research Computing Center http://www.unh.edu/research/rcc --------------------------------------------------