University of Toronto Network System

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University of Toronto Network System

6/3/2002

The University of Toronto's network-attached storage system gives users universal access to documents; Video conferencing enables global collaboration at Berklee College of Music.

A network-attached storage (NAS) system at the University of Toronto at Mississauga has made it possible for all 6,400 students to retrieve their data from anywhere- on or off campus. In the past, students stored files on floppy disks or on servers that could only be accessed from a particular computing services location. However, many files, such as Microsoft Corp. PowerPoint presentations, are too big for floppies, and students often use different computing centers as they move around campus.

The computing services staff evaluated a range of potential solutions and selected a NAS system over a storage-area network (SAN) because it was a better fit for file serving. Now, each student has a 10 MB storage area that he or she can access from any Microsoft Windows or Unix desktop at the university or from anywhere off campus via an Internet connection.

'We have received so much positive feedback on the NAS approach that, by popular demand, we are planning to expand it to cover 250 faculty members in the near future,' says J'e Lim, manager of computing services at the university. The new storage system is more convenient for students and less labor-intensive for the technical staff than the decentralized storage used in the past, he adds.

Mississauga, one of three campuses of the University of Toronto, offers degree programs in sciences, social sciences, management, and humanities and has more than 150 graduate students, predominantly in the life sciences. Students frequently use the campus' nine computing centers to prepare class assignments and conduct independent research.

With servers located at each computing center, it wasn't practical to offer each student dedicated storage on one server. Most students use multiple computing centers so offering storage at one center was a poor solution, complicated by the fact that there wasn't enough local storage to go around.
As a result, most students carried their work on floppy disks, which became increasingly difficult as average file sizes increased. Students often had to download large programs or work with graphics files that were too large to fit on a single floppy. Also, floppy disks sometimes became corrupted, and students who had neglected to back up their files had to redo significant amounts of work.

Some students tried to get around these problems by making special arrangements to store larger files at one of the computing centers, but this created administrative headaches for the staff because maintenance and backup tasks had to be repeated on multiple machines located throughout the campus.

The process of finding a solution to this problem, Lim says, led to a major debate among the technical staff. Some favored the SAN approach, in which servers are connected to storage at the block level, while others preferred the NAS approach, which connects the entire network to storage that is accessible at the file level. A consensus was reached to go with NAS because staff members concluded that it provided a simpler, more robust and more economical approach to what was, in essence, a file-serving application.