Storage Types – Tier 2

Technology Description

Tier 2 is built on a standard NFS storage platform and utilizes multiple machines to serve that storage via NFS mounts and Samba.  This technology provides data redundancy and geolocation, multiple access protocols, disaster recovery.  Tier 2 also provides Globus transfer access.

This tier is not intended for high throughput cluster compute jobs.  It is typically used for general file storage, sharing, SMB and NFS.

NOTE: The maximum share size for a Tier 2 share is 306TB.

To request a new allocation or update exiting allocations
please refer to the Storage Service Center Document.

Location(s)

Tier 2 servers are located in our Boston and Holyoke datacenters.  Depending on your workflow, you may want your lab’s Tier 2 storage to be located at one or the other.  FAS Research Computing support staff can discuss with you which datacenter is right for your lab.  See our Data Storage Service page for options.

Snapshots

Tier 2 does not offer user-accessible snapshots.  If you accidentally delete a file from Tier 2 storage, there is no way to directly recover it. If you require user-accessible snapshots, please see Tier 1.

Disaster Recovery Information

Whole filesystem copies of Tier 2 servers are maintained in another data center (Boston shares backed up to Holyoke and vice versa) for disaster recovery purposes.  These are are intended to allow FASRC to restore an entire filesystem/share in the event of catastrophic loss rather than allow access to individual files.