[premise-users] Premise HPC Storage Transition

[Robert E. Anderson]

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.

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Robert E. Anderson -- (603) 862-3489
Associate Director -- UNH Research Computing Center    
http://www.unh.edu/research/rcc
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