A new storage option has been developed by C&CZ. This page will show the technical details and properties of this storage, which will hopefully help you make a decision if this is something you want. Any storage we handout we call a “volume”. For these ZFS volumes:
- Size
- Storage size can be as large as you want, but smaller than the amount we can put in a single machine. Currently (2024+) we can buy machines with roughly 140-200 TB storage.
- Snapshots
- On this we enable snapshots, so that you can retrieve (deleted) files your self.
- Backup
- Each volume will be back upped to local S3 storage. This should be thought of as disaster recovery, and restoring from the cloud should (hopefully) be rarely needed.
All of these volumes are visible in DIY in the “Storage” section if you have access to them. How to order such storage can be seen here.
Access
Each volume can be access via Samba and NFS from machines where you can log in.
On a volume we configure two groups (of your choice):
- a read-write group
- a read-only group
If you are the owner of those groups you can change who can access what by removing are adding user into those groups in DIY. In the (near) future we also want to expose volume properties to DIY, so that group owners can e.g. increase the volume size.
Users of the volume can (naturally) change files they own and add/remove permissions.
Optional Features
The are a bunch of knobs we turn for each of these volumes. Depending on user demand this will also find a place in DIY, for now you’ll need to contact C&CZ.
- Sync all directories and files to the original read-write/read-only groups and remove any added groups and/or access.
- Temporary set the volume to read-only.
- Enable/disable backup.
Migration of Existing Volumes
There are currently no plans to migrate/consolidate exiting volumes. If your organization wants to discuss such a migration please contact C&CZ.
Compression
All ZFS volumes have compression on by default, this often results in significant reduction in used space and the quota is based on uncompressed size you can store more data in the size you pay for.
To figure out how much space your data is when not compressed, you can use the du --apparent-size command (usually du --apparent-size -sh . for a summery of the current directory) to show the total size of the data without compression.