We all need back-up from time to time, but few have been doing it longer than Paul Zarnowski, Assistant Director for Storage Services.
Paul manages three storage services at Cornell:
- Shared File Services (SFS): Introduced in January this year, provides shared file storage to groups of Cornell users that is network-accessible from their workstations, laptops, servers, and (soon) from their web and mobile devices via WebDAV.
- Storage Farm service: Provides a pool of disk space used by managed servers in the CIT Server Farm that has both internal CIT customers and campus customers from other departments.
- EZ-Backup: A fee-based, automated, remote backup/archive/storage service that currently backs up over 5,300 workstations, laptops and servers in support of most all undergraduate, graduate and administrative departments on campus.
Paul started EZ-Backup in 1994 out of a request that came from the Ag College before officially billing it as a service starting in January 1995, which is when he also began charting its cost and usage patterns.
What the data shows is that EZ-Backup has experienced consistent yearly growth over the history of the service as well as just as consistent yearly decline in the cost of storage, itself. Says Paul, “As fast as the cost of storage falls, our demand for it continues to increase.”
Importantly, in September of 2012, EZ-Backup surpassed one petabyte (that’s 2 to the 50th power bytes) of “billable data,” which is data that is stored either for backup or archival purposes. But since EZ-Backup data is normally compressed, the amount of source (uncompressed) data is actually much higher than one petabyte!
In his spare time, Paul enjoys traveling, golf, tennis, and photography; and of his long tenure at Cornell—34 years—he says, “If you’re in the IT business, you have to embrace change; you have to keep reinventing yourself.”
