Data Storage at the University of Auckland

40 terabytes (33 TB Raided) IBM Fibre Channel Serial ATA (Network Attached Storage)
Delivered end-Nov 2006
Shared scientific data dumps from Public Sources (GenBank, NCBI, Biomirror, Climate Physics)
Secured-shared internal research data from large experiments
ftp site mirroring large public ftp sites (for sourceforge, AARNET-ftp etc) for provision to KAREN members (only) (for research related tools etc)
Internal UoA medium term storage for near-line data from research activities (available as desktop filesystem as well as through portals)

The storage is now available for housing Research Data
Research Projects using the BeSTGRID Data GRID
It is currently available as smb (SAMBA) network storage internally to the University of Auckland. Hence, it can be made available to any Mac, Linux or Windows PC Desktop
We can also provide access via NFS to select servers in the University
Other services (such as rsync) are also available
If you are using the storage as smb, all usage (i.e. through rsync) should adhere to the SAMBA usage restrictions
Soon, it will be part of the national BeSTGRID Data GRID (i.e. globus GRID ftp, SRB etc)

One of the clients for Samba is the Windows family, therefore Samba has to support these requirements:

In the Windows API, the maximum length for a path is MAX_PATH, which is defined as 260 characters http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247.aspx
Files should not have illegal characters (? - question mark) in their names http://www.portfoliofaq.com/pfaq/FAQ00352.htm