Rogue file-servers

Being the person who manages our centralized file-server, I also have to deal with storage requests. The requests get directed to a layer or two higher than me, but I'm the one who has to make it so, or add new when the time comes. People never have enough storage, and when they ask for more sticker-shock means they often decide they can't have it.

It's a bad situation. End-users have a hard time realizing that the $0.07/GB hard-drive they can get from NewEgg has no bearing on what storage costs for us. My cheap-ass storage tier is about $1.50/GB, and that's not including backup infrastructure costs. So when we present a bill that's much more than they're expecting, the temptation to buy one of those 3.5TB 7.2K RPM SATA drives from NewEgg and slap it in a PC-turned-fileserver is high.

Fortunately(?) due to the decentralized nature of the University environment, what usually happens is that users go to their college IT department and ask for storage there. For individual colleges that have their own IT people, this works for them. I know of major storage concentrations that I have absolutely nothing to do with in the Libraries and the College of Science and Technology, and a smaller but still significant amount in Huxley. CST may have as much storage under management as I do, but I can't tell from here.

Which is to say, we generally don't have to worry about this problem. That problem? That's what happens when you have a central storage system that can't meet demand, and no recourse for end-users to fix it some other way.

And I'd hate to be the sysadmin who has to come down on that person like a ton of bricks. I'd do it, I won't like it, because I also hate not meeting my user's needs that flagrantly, but I'd still do it. Having users do that kind of end-run leads to pain everywhere in time.