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Shared File Storage

CLAS IT offers secure hosting to faculty, staff, and department. Departments have access to shared departmental drives (shares) that can be used for sharing documents with multiple users. Each CLAS employee has access to a drive for storing individual user data (home drive).

  • Department shares (S:) – access is controlled by department Active Directory groups. Department contacts or office managers should contact CLAS IT to update permissions or create new folders.
  • Home drives (H:) – access is limited to the account user. On CLAS-managed workstations, saving to the Documents folder is the same as saving to the home drive.
  • Research – available by request for research data. Contact CLAS IT for details.

All files in these network drives are regularly backed up and can be accessed remotely from other computers.

What to Store on Shared Drives

Shared file storage is intended for academic use. See the CLAS Account Policy for more details.

Research data should not be stored in department shares or home drives.

If you have temporary files that do not need to be backed up or large files that only need to be stored on the local computer, avoid saving to your shared drive or the Documents folder. For example, save temporary files to a folder on the Desktop.

Connecting to Shared Drives

Mac and Linux users must manually map their drives in order to access network drive files. The same is true if connecting from off-campus or using campus wireless. On CLAS-managed computers, departmental shares and home drives are available on your machine when you log in.

Service Support

CLAS IT is responsible for supporting the server infrastructure, granting file access, making backups of the data, and recovering files when requested. Our standard request turnaround is one business day.

UFiT is responsible for network connectivity through the campus network.

Pricing

Service is provided by CLAS IT at no cost to CLAS departments and employees.There may be a fee if more space is needed.

There may be a fee for research storage and additional space. For more information or to purchase file storage, contact us.

Requirements

Users must be current CLAS faculty and staff. Graduate students can get access to a home drive by request from the department.

Backup and Recovery

Data is stored on a replicated EMC Isilon SAN storage array with redundant switching and nodes in case of hardware failure.  A backup server is located off site and it also has redundant storage controlled by UFIT.  Snapshots are taken once a day for the home drives and once every night for the department share. Snapshots are archived for three months.

Service Targets

Standard provisioning turnaround

Department file sharing and private user home space are critical production resources.  As such the goal is to have 100% uptime except for standard maintenance windows on Thursday from 8pm to Midnight.  Any planned outages outside of the standard maintenance window will be announced 72 hours in advance.

Standard request turnaround

CLAS IT responds to tickets and requests as soon as possible during normal business hours. Our standard request turnaround is 1 business day.

How long to restore service

  • Outage/unusable?  > Server Crash but SAN and data are fine, and complete restoration of server VM from backup is required: 1 hour.  Server crash and partial SAN data destroyed: 8  hours. Server crash and total restoration required: 5 days.
  • Degraded/unreliable? >  up to 8 hours
  • Minor/inconvenient? > 2 hour response time, Resolution can take several days.