Ceph File Storage¶

Access¶

• We currently provide access to a file share through NFS and SMB protocols. With future versions of Ceph we will also offer unprivileged access via native Ceph for Linux systems.
• Users can request a personal file share for storing personal data, or, users can request on behalf of their team/organizational unit a file share to collaborate with.
• Additionally some central file shares with common data is available (e.g. bfh-geodata).

Users can request a personal file share:

• staff-${ACCOUNT} for staff
• students-${ACCOUNT} for students

Additionally users can request unpersonal areas as well. These are loosly following the structur of BFH:

• ${DEPARTMENT}-${INSTITUTE}
• ${DEPARTMENT}-${INSTITUTE}-${PROJECT}

There is no technical difference between personal and unpersonal areas. The idea is that in personal areas people put files that are bound to them, means their files will be removed once they have no BFH account anymore when they have left BFH.

Unpersonal file shares are ment for ongoing things like projects that will be continued when a person has left thus the file share keeps the same. Or more generally it is ment for areas where multiple people work together, like research.

Replicas¶

Storage on Ceph is provided with 3 replicas: Ceph ensures for redundancy and performance reasons that every file is always 3 times available.

Snapshot¶

Backup is done through snapshots which are accessible in .snap in every directory. We automatically create snapshots every hour and rotate them:

• hourly snapshots for 1 week
• daily snapshots for 1 months
• weekly snapshots for 6 months
• monthly snapshots for 1 year
• yearly snapshots for 10 years

Additionally users can create their own snapshots anytime they like by creating a directory in .snap. This will recursively create a new snapshot for that particular directory.

Open a Ticket¶

Please open a ticket in the servicedesk <https://servicedesk.bfh.ch> and include the following information:

Queue: Linux
Service: Ceph
Protocols: SMB or NFS (SMB if unsure)

Name/Project:
Size:
Duration:

We will get back to you and help you getting optimal access to your new file share.