File Services FAQs

What do we mean by file services, and why is this important?

ITS offers file storage on a server to all Faculty, Staff, and Students. Offering this service on a server has the following advantages over the user simply storing the file on their own equipment:

Data is stored on our SAN which is highly reliable and available.
Data is backed up using our backup system.
Data can be shared by others if desired by the file owner.
Users do not need to directly bear the cost of storage.

Offering reliable file services is important since a majority of people at the college use files to do their work and rely on ITS to store them.

Another aspect of file services is authentication and authorization. Point 3 above covers the use of a NetID to verify if someone should have access to a file but this also applies to how someone accesses an ITS-managed computer, e.g. a Lab or Standard Desktop system.

What is our current system for managing personal and shared network file space?

Our current system is provided by a mix of Novell Netware and OES2.

What are the problems & constraints with the current system?

Netware has been EOL'd by the vendor in favor of SLES running on OES
SLES on OES has been unreliable and requires a weekly reboot to prevent AFP from crashing and to prevent NCP timeouts.
There were so many SLES/OES problems that the conversion of our Home Directories from Netware to SLES/OES was canceled.
OES is proprietary and difficult to fix and vendor support is lacking.
Novell's end-user web-interface (Netstorage) could be better.
Certain clients (mainly Network Scanners) are unable to use NCP.

What are the options for improved files services?

Our options are constrained by what popular clients can use to connect. A long time ago Novell established the Proprietary NCP Protocol which requires a clients that Novell provides (mainly for Windows). Overtime SMB has become the dominant protocol. There are other network file service protocols like AFP or NFS but they only work for Mac or Unix systems. In contrast every popular client speaks SMB.

What are we doing to improve files services? What is decided (and why)? What remains to be decided?

We have decided to use SMB because it is supported by all popular clients and there isn't really any other popular Network File Service Protocol. We have not yet decided how exactly to implement SMB. Given our area of expertise and leaning towards using Open Source Software our research has been in using the Samba implementation of SMB using RedHat Linux on the server side. Clients (Windows, Mac, and even Linux desktops) would then access these services using the standard software already included.

A file services working group

What are the conditions (including expertise and any budget) and time line for proceeding with comprehensive file service improvements?

The main costs are Staff time and Server Upgrades.

Server Upgrades

We plan to run our new File Services in a virtualized environment on our cluster so we will need to purchase more nodes for our cluster to handle the extra load. This will provide reliable service given the cluster's redundancy. We will need to be sure we have adequate IOP performance on the cluster to support file services. In the worst case we will fall back to running directly on the new nodes, though we will have this worked out prior to deploying in production. The current pilot system is on the cluster.

We have enough storage space on our SAN to hold the extra space which we will need to transition between the old and new service. We currently use 4.6TB in Pardee and 6.7TB in AEC. Only the Pardee SAN has the extra space so we will focus on deploying in Pardee and then migrating to AEC when the old file services can go.

Staff Time

There is now a File Services Working group which consists of members from Network Services and User Services as well as AIS. Together we will shape what the user experience of file services will be based on what is possible and pilot new versions of the system.

This will be a major project for both Network Services and User Services and will be in flight for the next year. For more details see the draft of the Plan.