Row of Servers in Data Center

Cutover Complete

The project-related outage to replace the university’s Research File Storage (ResFS) began Friday, Dec. 15 and service was restored on Wednesday, Dec. 20.

About Research File Storage

UPDATE: The final phase of the Office of Research, Center for Research Computing and KU IT project to replace the university’s Research File Storage (ResFS) is complete. 

The Office of Research, Center for Research Computing and KU IT are engaged in a project to replace the Research File Storage (ResFS) equipment.

The cutover began at 5 p.m. Friday, Dec. 15 and service was restored by 8 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 20. During the cutover, all access, connections or processes that involve data stored on ResFS and the research cluster was temporarily suspended and read-only access was provided to data. 

With this update, the project team took great care to minimally impact researchers, including preserving the namespace for data files and shares.

    Service Restored

    Research File Storage (ResFS) service was restored on Wednesday, Dec. 20. We appreciate your patience as we upgrade the ResFS system. Please contact your local tech support team or the IT Customer Service Center (ITCSC) if you have any issues accessing your files and data.
    Questions? Questions?

    As part of this project, the team took special care to ensure that file names and paths were not altered; you should expect storage to function as it did prior to the upgrade. You may need to reconnect to ResFS shares and restart processes, scripts or related activities. The following additional steps may be necessary to ensure shares are successfully remounted to your workstation and instruments: 

    • Researchers using Windows machines may need to restart.  
    • Researchers using NFS exports on a Linux OS system will need to reconnect the exports.

    Additional Information

    Yes, the Center for Research Computing and Office of Research will be updating the pricing and structure of this file storage service. These details will be provided after the upgrade and will go into effect Jan. 1, 2024.

    While several factors influence the overall performance of ResFS, the performance of the new hardware will improve with this upgrade. Our initial performance testing shows a write speed three times faster than the original hardware. Specifically:

    • Old Hardware: 2778726400 bytes (2.8 GB) copied, 15.0612 s, 184 MB/s
    • New Hardware: 2778726400 bytes (2.8 GB) copied, 4.98235 s, 558 MB/s

    File paths/names will remain the same after this upgrade. The project team took special consideration to ensure that the solution did not impact the file namespace.