Storage Administration

Service Owner: Andrew Johnson

NIU’s Division of Information Technology (DoIT) provides and supports a variety of hosting and management options for virtual server environments.

Virtualization allows multiple and independent virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical server. Currently managing more than 1,000 VM’s, DoIT has dramatically lessened the cost of cooling systems and network infrastructure while saving additional space in our data centers. Moreover, these VM’s can be configured and delivered at a fraction of the time it would take to quote, purchase, and install a physical server.

At NIU, RAM and CPU can easily be scaled up or down for anticipated increases or decreases in use throughout the year. Popular cloud-hosting services like Amazon and Microsoft currently do not include support or backups in their advertised monthly fees, making the DoIT offering more than cost-competitive.  DoIT support includes:

  • OS support (Windows or Linux) including license fees, upgrades and security patches.
  • Nightly backups.
  • Hardware maintenance and monitoring 24 / 7 / 365 with alerts and optional reports emailed to customers.
  • High-speed low latency interconnections to enterprise-grade storage and network.
  • Network connection fees.
  • Malware protection.

Storage Options

Option Rate Request
OneDrive for individual and shared drives: 1TB no charge auto-provisioned for current faculty, staff, and students
Network Attached Storage for shared drives: 25GB blocks $1.00/25GB/month Submit request at it.niu.edu

Data Protection Options

Option Rate Request
Option 1: Version Control File storage and backups on a single storage array, and by itself does not protect against a catastrophic array or data center failure. It is instead designed to work with your existing departmental data copies as part of a full 3-2-1 strategy. Submit request at it.niu.edu
Option 2: Geo-Redundancy Files and single snapshots for 30 days on a primary and secondary NAS environment. This guards against a catastrophic environmental failure in one of the data centers but only allows for data retrieval within a 30-day period.
Option 3: True Backup File storage and backups on a primary NAS with files, nightly incremental / weekly differential / and monthly full backups.  This combines convenient self-restore options through NAS with the full flexibility of an enterprise-grade backup AND offsite replication.
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