The Research Archival Storage System (RAS) is a 1.6 petabyte storage system that provides long-term POSIX compliant storage for large amounts of research data.

Key features

• Low-cost storage - Refer to the pricing page for current rates.  Our objective is for RAS storage to be relatively low-cost compared to our parallel storage system (GPFS).
• Data access via Globus - The primary access mechanism for RAS storage is Globus, which provides a reliable and high performance system for  moving large amounts of data on-campus and to research partners off-campus.
• Copy data to/from HPC and Spear via SCP/SFTP - The RAS is not mounted on Spear or HPC nodes, but you can easily use SCP and SFTP to transfer data to and from the RAS and our computing clusters. This enables the creation of automated workflows to archive research data after processing.
• Fully supported platform - The RAS is a fully-managed, enterprise-grade storage platform. The system is managed by a full-time team at Florida State University. It resides in a managed, controlled access data center and is connected to multiple high-speed networks.

Use Cases:

• Data repository storage - The RAS offers the ability to store large amounts of data at low-cost on a managed system.
• High-Speed Data replication - Using Globus, researchers can make research data available for transfer to and from other systems and services, both on-campus and off-campus.

Hardware and software

The software platform is ZFS on Linux, which is open source software.  This allows us to form RAID groups out of our disks to provide redundancy against hardware failure of drives.

ZFS also includes the ability for breaking up storage into volumes, each with its own quota.

The hardware platform consists of two Lenovo D3284 enclosures, along with two storage heads, and a third "quorum" server.  The number of physical disks in the devices are 84 (168 total) 10TB 7200 RPM SAS drives.