CCEI Storage Appliance

The plankton.che.udel.edu appliance is a home-grown medium-scale storage system. Under the hood it uses a ZOL (ZFS on Linux) filesystem. ZFS has several benefits:

• Per-directory quota control: any directory (be it a user's storage, content to be visible on the web, whatever) can have a quota (maximum size) or a reservation (guaranteed size)
• Storage pools: the filesystem doesn't live on physical hard disks, it is spread across groups of disks; the filesystem is easily grown by adding more disks
• Increased integrity: ZFS has advanced data-integrity features like triple-parity RAID and self-healing of silent corruption

ZFS on Linux is an open source project that derives from the Sun (now Oracle) ZFS code that is a part of the Solaris operating system.

With ZOL providing the storage, the appliance needs interfaces through which users (CCEI staff and students) can access it. The following file-sharing mechanisms are currently configured on plankton:

• Samba: Also known as CIFS or SMB, Samba allows you to mount directories on plankton on your Windows/Mac/Linux desktop and work with them as you would any other disk (drag and drop to copy, double-click to open and edit). Samba is NOT a secure file transfer protocol, though, so it is available ONLY when you are on-campus. Even when on-campus, don't use it on any data you consider to be private.
• SFTP/SCP: The Secure FTP and Secure CP programs (part of the SSH client suite) can be used from anywhere on the Internet to connect to plankton and manipulate files.
• NFS: Each CCEI student with an account on squidward as well as on plankton can access his/her plankton directory directly from the head node of squidward.