Vault 2016

Clemson is migrating from large proprietary file system technologies to open source software. We are mid­deployment of over 10 petabytes of SAS­attached JBOD storage for multiple use cases including traditional file system backup solutions, database backups, user/group file services, and HPC file services.

From the start, deployment and operation of these environments presented challenges; from hardware decisions to performance profiling/benchmarking, from storage pool creation to day­to­day user and dataset management. We’ll discuss these real world pain points and how we solved them (or plan to solve them). Born of our frustrations, what started out as a few basic administration scripts has become a multifunctional automated administration utility whose purpose is to make large­scale deployment and operation of open technologies realistic and feasible.