We’ve been evolving our technique for recording courses (lecture capture) and events such as the weekly Jones Seminar.
This term, we are recording seven courses using four different techniques. At this point in Lecture Capture, we haven’t found a suitable "one size fits all" solution.
Below I briefly touch on how we deliver the recordings to students, and details of each lecture capture method.
We’ve made the decision to not have a camera operator for any recording. We just don’t have the person resources for this to
[snip...]
If you are just joining us, read part one and part two in the exciting series.
So after waiting over two years to dive into the cheap storage arena, we finally decided to go with a pretty boring solution. In this case, we hope boring will mean that it is a stable solution and easy to replace once our dream system comes along.
We chose to serve files with CIFS and NFS from a single server running Linux. Here are the details:
[caption id="attachment_278" align="alignright" [snip...]
Not all bits are created equal
There are many reasons to pay for the reliability, rich feature set, and fail-over capabilities of our NetApp. The NetApp is an excellent product. However, there is also a significant amount of data at Thayer that just doesn’t need all the advanced features. For instance, we have research groups with multi-Terabyte data sets that just want their data easily accessible. If it were unavailable occasionally it wouldn’t be a huge deal. Other features such as [snip...]
Almost from the day our NetApp (ThayerFS) was powered up, we’ve been on the hunt for a cheaper file server alternative. We’re very pleased with the functionality of the NetApp, but dollar per gigabyte and several seemingly arbitrary limitations left us curious of alternative options.
The cost of our NetApp storage is a little fuzzy. Over the years, we’ve come up with calculations from around 2.50 – 12 dollars per gigabyte. But if you head over to NewEgg and buy a stand-alone 2 [snip...]
We’ve bumped the default ThayerFS disk quota from 512 MB up to 1 GB. We also doubled the, “no questions asked”, maximum quota for undergraduates to 2 GB.
The “no questions asked” maximum quotas for graduate students remains at 5GB and 10GB for faculty and staff. As always, if you have reasonable case for needing more space, just let us know.
Full details about ThayerFS quotas are here.
