Storage Area Network

The group manages the Institute's Storage Area Networks (SAN) that provide 1 Petabyte central storage for all Departments and Service Groups. Each departmental storage volume consists of a redundant set of disks, RAID level 6 (allowing 2 disks per volume to fail without service interruption) with additional spare disks. The storage is accessed through separate Linux based file servers using NFS (Unix/Linux) or Samba/CIFS (Windows, MacOS). The SAN consists of six controller heads (IBM DS3512/V3700/GSS). Two Fiberchannel switches redundantly connect the SAN controllers to the file servers. Compared to directly connected storage hardware this solution allows flexible relocation, smooth expansion and migration of storage without downtime.