What is the advertised uptime of the service?

The Network Storage Service has been designed to have an uptime of 99.5%.

 

Is any compensation available if the 99.5% availability figure is not achieved?

As this is a 'break-even' service, there is no scope to offer financial compensation if the service does not meet its published service levels. However, this would be investigated and addressed at a senior level both within IT and with our service partners.

 

What level of data durability can I expect?

All data is held in resilient and redundant storage arrays (no single component can fail and prevent the service operating), in data centres that have been designed for 99.9%+ availability (with both battery and generator power backup); 24/7 monitoring is provided as part of our managed services contract.

Storage arrays are protected by double-parity RAID with disk monitoring and hot spares so that drives which start to show signs of impending failure are taken out of service and replaced before they cause any issues for the service.

 

Are snapshots available on both copies of the data?

Snapshots are available for both the onsite and offsite copies.

 

Will I need to reconfigure my storage access in the event of a fail-over?

In the event that access is lost to the onsite storage arrays, the IP address you use to connect to your storage will be moved to the offsite data centre.  You would not need to reconfigure anything, although you may need to reconnect (login/out or restart your client). The decision to move to the offsite copy would be taken by the IT Service Management and Infrastructure Executive leader, based on advice from the Infrastructure teams and the partner who manages the service on our behalf.

 

What protection is there against bit rot?

A degree of checksumming and disk scrubbing is performed as part of the normal storage array maintenance.

If you are concerned about bit rot, you could consider the Arkivum service, offered through the Research Data Management team in the University Library- https://library.leeds.ac.uk/info/14062/research_data_management.  This is an insurance backed, 100% bit perfect data archive service.

 

Who manages permissions?

The primary and secondary owners are given Full Control of the share by default.  They will then be able to manage access for other users to the share.

 

How are the shares structured?

Unless specified otherwise, each share has two folders on them named 'Data' and 'Users'.  The data folder is shared by all users who are granted access to the share. 

The users folder is where individual users can save data in their own folder ie Users\uitxxxx.  The creation of these folders and their access permissions can be managed by those who have Full Control access.