On Apr 18, 2008, at 2:34 PM, Tony Schreiner wrote:
> I don't want to impose quotas, as appealing an idea as that sounds.
> The machines are for grant funded work by a relatively small number
> of total users. There are legitimate reasons for them to be
> generating the amount of data that they are. Bionformatics being the
> field that it is, the size of data sets grows exponentially with time.
>
> I do have a policy of certain directories not being backed up; but I
> need to remind the users; and perhaps take a harder line with them.

I used to work in an academic biotech lab for over 10 years, and I can  
vouch for that volume of data, this is not just Word docs and e-mail  
and such.  The data is what really makes them their money to get new  
grants, so there is not much you can do to get them to limit the data,  
data = $ in this case.

Every time grant renewals come around, and people are putting requests  
for money into their proposal for new machines, you have to remind  
them that the data also needs to be backed up, and they should also  
budget for the hardware that will be needed to do that, the hardware  
does not just appear out of thin air and there may not be enough in  
the general IT budget alone to cover that.  End of the FY is another  
good time to put a bug in their ear, there may be some "use it or lose  
it" funds they could contribute to hardware purchases that are of  
general benefit to everybody.  Always advise people what they "should"  
be doing and what is really required to get the job done--if they are  
unwilling or unable to provide what is really necessary, you can do  
your best and make do, but you can't promise that there won't be  
problems down the road if things are held together with chewing gum  
and bailing wire so to speak.

Jonathan

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