Proposal

Our cloud infrastructure in the College of Engineering and Computer Science is composed of many levels like networking, servers, & storage to name a few.  Thanks to past tech fee and engineering funds, we have been able to expand these resources in the past.  We are however, at a point where our student cloud storage will soon approach its capacity and technology limits.  The existing storage is based on the older spinning disks also known as hard disks.  In the past hard disks have been sufficient for the average work load.  On cloud based desktops our students generate a lot of input/output (I/O) operations due to the demands of classroom work loads.  In order to satisfy this high demand for storage (I/O) operations we would like to add high speed flash based capacity to our system.  Flash based storage is a proven technology that can generate 10x times the performance of hard disks.  The college has already made an investment into this type of storage and has purchased the base hardware.  If this proposal is funded by the tech fee committee it will allow us to leverage the college’s hardware and expand upon the resources with additional high speed flash disks.  It will also allow us to deliver a rich and seamless desktop experience that can handle the instructional workloads that are placed on our students.