Storage

Zoom image: EMC Isilon storage system EMC Isilon storage system.

CCR offers a wide range of storage options to suit the variety of needs and budgets of our all users.  See below for details on all we have to offer.  Please contact us to discuss your data storage needs and how we can best provide assistance for your research projects.

On this page:

Vast Data Storage

The Vast Data, Inc. storage solution serves as the high reliability core storage for user home and group project directories.  The storage system consists of 2PB of usable storage in a hierarchical storage pool connected to the CCR core network with eight 40GigE links.  The storage is designed to tolerate simultaneous failures, helping ensure the 24x7x365 availability of the Center's primary storage.  

In early 2024, the Vast Storage system will be expanded and will also be used for global scratch storage. 

See all the details about Vast & Panasas storage in our documentation

Panasas High Speed Scratch

Zoom image: EMC Isilon Storage EMC Isilon Storage.

The 1.4 PB (petabyte) Panasas ActiveStor Ultra storage system is CCR's high performance parallel file system.   With 40GigE connections to the core Arista network, it provides I/O performance in excess of 30 GigaBytes per second sustained in tests.  Designed for high performance and concurrent access, CCR’s Panasas is primarily intended for generation and analyses of large quantities of short-lived data (scratch usage).  This storage will be decommissioned in 2024 and replaced with the Vast Storage for global scratch.

Local Scratch

All servers and compute nodes in all the clusters have local disk space (/scratch).

  • This scratch space is available to batch jobs running on the clusters.
  • Data on local scratch may be subject to removal as soon as the job completes
  • There is NO backup of data in /scratch.
     

Cloud Storage

UB maintains a research compute cloud, Lake Effect, available for access by UB faculty, staff, and students.  There is a small fee for usage.  In addition to access to virtual machines, users can also purchase storage in the cloud.  This storage is only accessible from servers within the cloud so it is not intended for use on the HPC clusters at CCR.  If you're looking for general cloud storage, we recommend you use UBbox, a product offered by UBIT

For more details, please check out our detailed Lake Effect knowledgebase articles.

NOTE: Data in the cloud is NOT backed up!

 

Additional Info about our storage options