UPDATE:  The IR storage system will be migrated to a new DDN storage system with much larger storage capacity in 2013.

All of the http://scholarship.rice.edu digital content is managed on servers in Rice University’s Primary Data Center and is backed up regularly. Content is stored on a clustered storage system, Isilon, which provides robust, highly fault-tolerant and scalable storage for the content. Characteristics include:

• Bitstream checksums are verify nightly and compare against the checksums in the database that were saved at ingest time.
• Data is redundantly spread across multiple disks and multiple CPU nodes to prevent loss of data in the event of multiple disc or hardware failures. The system is set at the "n-2" level, which means any two disks on a single node have to fail before a node is lost, and any two entire nodes must fail before data is lost.
• The Isilon system is self-healing, so if one disk or node fails, it automatically moves data around until it regains n-2 protection, meaning data is only lost if multiple failures happen quickly before healing can finish. All nodes can (and routinely do) serve all the content from the whole cluster, so there is no single master node.
• maximum size : 12 TB (library share)