ITC provides a basic amount of disk storage at no charge to members of the University community through the Home Directory Service. A disk quota is set for each account when it is allocated. If this amount is not sufficient for an individual's needs, or if a group wishes to share a larger block of disk, ITC makes these larger allocations available through an annual lease.
Leased storage is made available from high-availability,
high-performance cluster of Network Appliance file servers,
providing access to your disk storage from Unix, Windows,
and Macintosh systems. This managed file service uses
fully redundant hardware, with daily backups to an off-site
facility, and with ITC providing the system administrators.
The rates for leasing space are set only to recover the cost
of the file service hardware, software, maintenance and backups.
Space is available for lease in increments of 1000 megabytes
(approximately one gigabyte). The annual rates are
$21.00 base fee, plus 17.50/GB for up to 10 GB 14.25/GB for the next 90 GB (up to 100) 13.75/GB for any additional (over 100)
Anyone who leases storage for his or her home directory will have the leased amount added to the standard ITC quota which is given to all users. The only change made to a home directory for someone leasing the space is that it may be moved into one of the filesystems on home2.virginia.edu, where ITC can guarantee the availability of the space being leased. Otherwise, it is identical to the default home directory. Because all user storage is part of very large filesystems, with allocations controlled by quotas, adding incremental amounts can be done easily and quickly.
To request additional storage for your home directory, send mail to
systems@Virginia.EDU.
The storage is not any individual's home directory. This lends some permanence to it, in that if one member of the group leaves the University, that individual's home directory will soon be removed, but the storage outside the home directory is unaffected by that account removal, so the files in the departmental storage would remain. Access to the directory is itself not password protected. Instead, ITC will establish a group whose members are the individual login ids you want to have access to the storage, and access to the directory will be restricted to only members of the group. Each person would use his or her own login id and password for validation.
From Windows (Vista, XP, 2000, 98), Mac OS X, and Linux system using
SMB client software, users who are in the group authorized to access
the share will be able to map this directory as a network drive on
their desktop systems, using a share name like
\\home2\mygroupdirectory (on Windows), or
smb://home2.virginia.edu/mygroupdirectory (on Mac OS X)
You get to pick what you what "mygroupdirectory" to be named, as long
as it doesn't conflict with one we have already established. Some kind
of group-specific name is usually best.
If needed, multiple Unix groups may be used to give the owner the ability to further restrict access to portions of the storage.
To request a lease of a group directory, send mail to
systems@Virginia.EDU.