Proposal

Narrative

This proposal is to request the replacement of our primary file server that hosts all our student's academic and research work for the College. The Students of the College of Engineering and Computer Science generate, store and analyze terabytes of data for their academic and research studies. Much of this data is generated from large scientific and engineering applications such as Solidworks, Autocad, Visual Studio, Matlab. Our current file servers maintain about 80 Terabytes of data in our primary datacenter with a secondary server located in a different data center across campus. Our existing file servers have reached capacity (about 5% space is remaining) and the equipment also has reached their end of maintenance and life (approximately 5 years). As such, we need to look at building out a scalable storage solution that will continue to grow with our students' needs for the next 3-5 years. The IT staff of the college have worked closely with our DELL sales team to design a file server solution that we can migrate our data into as well as scale easily by adding more hard drives as our capacity needs increase. We also have designed the solution to be able to replicate to the Public Cloud as we begin to move our infrastructure to the cloud in order to provide a highly available computer infrastructure for our students and faculty.

Facilities

No renovations or upgrades will be needed. The equipment will be hosted in the Engineering East datacenter (managed by Engineering IT Staff). We will move our current file server to CM22 datacenter (managed by OIT).

Hardware Requirements

The storage solution is comprised of a primary file server (DELL Compellent SC3000). It will provide a 122 TB of capacity (versus our current max capacity of 80 TB) and also provide compression capabilities so that we can compress files to save on disk space. In order to provide replication of our data, the IT staff will take our current file server(s) and consolidate the storage to build a secondary file server that will be located in the CM22 OIT data center. This will allow us to save money by avoiding having to pay for a second compellent.

Software Requirements

There are no software requirements as this is primarily a hardware request.

Personnel Costs

There are no personnel costs. All equipment will be installed and maintained by the College's IT staff.

Other Costs

There are no other costs other than the file server.

Timeline

The equipment will be installed in the summer of 2018.

Sustainability

The equipment will come with a 5 year on site hardware and software warranty. This will last the expected life of the equipment.

Resource Matching

There are no direct resource matching. However, the IT staff will repurpose the existing storage system and hard drives to build out a secondary file server to have a backup of the data.

Implementing Organization

All equipment will be installed and maintained by the College's IT staff.