Research Storage and Data Transfer
- Dave Flynn
This page documents an array of storage and networking resources available to Carleton faculty. In general, the solutions described here are available to any faculty member, although some of them require an investment of hardware specific to your project(s) and others may be available immediately. For example, while Carleton can support 10 gigabit networking throughout the datacenter, that capability may not yet be available in your specific building and sometimes requires an investment (and time from ITS staff) before it can be added. In general, we encourage you to ask us for help if you have questions or a need that does not seem obviously met by the existing solutions. To do so, the best option is to email helpdesk@carleton.edu and open a ticket, which will be routed to the proper team for assistance.
Data Transfer Node (DTN)
The DTN is a high-performance storage/networking system designed to ingest and export large datasets at 10g speeds. It was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Broadly speaking, the DTN is a large storage server with a specially-designed networking subsystem capable of transferring data at speeds that most other systems at Carleton cannot match (due to a combination of storage and networking limitations). It is a physical server located in Carleton's datacenter and managed primarily by ITS sysadmins.
Physically, the DTN is a 45drives "Storinator" chassis with 30 physical drives installed. This server runs CentOS Linux and ZFS for storage management. The drives are subdivided into 'zpools' of five drives apiece and then logically grouped together into a single volume. This volume is then subdivided logically in software into discrete NFS shares that are exported to individual faculty servers as needed. The general idea is that faculty can buy space on this server by purchasing hard drives in sets of five, which ITS staff will then install and manage on behalf of the relevant researcher. Importantly, the DTN is not a computational server; it is optimized for data storage and high-speed transfer only.