Performance and Progress Report - John Doe FIX: put in the authors ...

the design and maintenance of the web-site, adding an outreach section to the web-site
(coming soon), and helping design and build museum exhibits for marine/science centers.
In addition to the academic, research and technical staff, Abby Pagan-Allis and Linda
Prescott are our Program Managers and keepers of order with the able assistance of
Maureen Claussen.
Facilities and Equipment:
With the startup of the Center, the University provided a new 8000 square foot building.
Given the very rapid growth of the Center, space became the limiting factor in our ability
to take on new projects. In 2003 we expanded into the second floor of the new building
providing greatly needed additional office, graduate student and meeting space.
Our computing facilities continue to grow and evolve in order to keep up with our
expanding research needs. Center servers are currently in a state of migration with respect
to roles and software upgrades. Earlier in the year, all Linux server operating systems
were upgraded from Red Hat 9 to Red Hat Enterprise 4 for security and compatibility
reasons, but after additional testing, it was decided that the final operating system would
be CentOS Linux, which is identical to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but freely distributed.
All remaining Microsoft Windows 2000 servers have been upgraded to Microsoft
Windows Server 2003. Our remaining SGI/IRIX server has been decommissioned and
replaced with a CentOS server, running on Dell/PC hardware, negating SGI excessive
annual maintenance costs.
With new students and staff arriving each semester, the Center continues to grow at an
accelerated rate. Given the large number of active research projects and academic
courses, we have begun development of a Center Intranet website, consisting of an online
knowledge base, researcher blogs, and consolidated wiki to encourage collaboration
within the Center. In addition, the Intranet will also provide webmail, web calendar, web
mapping, purchase authorization tracking and an asset management system for Center
users. To compliment the Intranet, we have also upgraded our version control software
from CVS to Subversion, making it safer and less difficult for researchers and students to
track changes during the development of computer applications. In addition, other core
services have been upgraded recently, including email, web services, and FTP.
An increase in both the number of research projects and the volume of data collected for
each project has put a strain on the Center’s storage resources, and as such, the Center has
purchased a Network Appliance FAS960c iSCSI Storage Area Network (SAN). The new
SAN provides an additional 24TB of raw storage capacity for the Center, bringing the
grand total to approximately 36TB. In addition to the benefit of increased storage
capacity, the FAS960c provides higher throughput than conventional disk drives,
decreasing processing time for research projects. It also provides the Center with the
ability to centralize all research data in a single location. The current plan is to migrate
approximately 10TB of research data from our Legacy direct attached storage systems to
the SAN. Currently, this process is about 50% complete. Recent projects have increased
the need for storage exponentially. To accommodate for the increased network utilization
JHC Performance Report 15 30 January 2007