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Storage; Chargeback / Dealing with PIs who buy Drobos. BRIITE 2012. Problem statement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfLXAtRJfY. Options for dealing with a PI who buys one: Murder them Abandon them Take it in. Winner: Take it in. Better in the data center than out
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Storage; Chargeback / Dealing with PIs who buy Drobos BRIITE 2012
Problem statement http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfLXAtRJfY
Options for dealing with a PI who buys one: • Murder them • Abandon them • Take it in
Winner: Take it in • Better in the data center than out • All you’re offering is power, UPS, cooling • Not backup • Not admin • When it dies: • Offer them a deal • (e.g., 50% off for 1st yr) • Then they’re hooked
Chargeback: YMMV • Objectives: • Cost recovery • Making people aware • Funding profile of your organization • Lots of grants • One or two big foundations
Chargeback in context • Everything free, hard storage quotas • Chargeback for storage • Chargeback for storage and computation • Chargeback for everything (including network ports/network infrastructure fee)
Chargeback for storage – examples: • Each lab gets 100GB per employee free, after that $1000/year/TB • Each PI gets 1TB free, but if you go over, we charge for everything - high tier $72/month/TB, low tier $12/month/TB • Free amount of storage, then $80/TB/month up to 20 TB, then “storage condoing” in 20TB chunks • Bill based on snapshot at fixed time per month, or on average usage • Backup: either backup everything, paying out of overhead, or charge extra for “disaster recovery insurance”
Storage condos: • Issue a quote for take-it-or-leave-it storage server • They pay for all the storage in the chunk whether or not they use it • Each chunk is an independent storage server • Horizontally scales performance • They can take it with them if they leave • Note: pay-per-use can justify a higher cost/TB than condoing
To think about before you start: • Understand your objectives • Socialize before you start • Engender a sense of inevitability • Think about branding • Crawl the filesystem/gather stats • Showback before you chargeback
Other things to think about: • Reality that outliers use most of the space • 2 labs = 70% of storage • 3 labs = 90% of storage • Price to cost of storage: small labs get piddly bills • Not encouraging awareness • Price to more than cost: big labs get huge bills • Consider bulk pricing • Some core facilities buy storage and then bundle the cost into their service • Consider super cheap tier: long term tape storage • Some allocation free, thereafter media cost • Consider local mirror of big, widely used datasets • TGCA, dbGaP, 1000 Genomes
Odds and sods, vaguely related: • Data deduplication technology • Expensive, nifty for VMs • Main use case: reducing backup windows • Desktop backup • They do that? (me) • TSM works for laptops because it’s client-initiated • Only offer it for the big shots • Dropbox • One organization’s survey shows 500 dropbox installs on 3000 desktops • It’s a risk – what are they uploading? • Start with a “cloud data policy” – ask your compliance person