Large Group Permissions

Some general information about available storage systems:

• Panasas: 750TB capacity. Parallel FS. Snapshot protection, not replicated.
  It has a PanFS ACL, which is similar to the NFSv4 ACL.

• VASTdata (Vstor): 1.4PB capacity. General storage. Snapshot+Replication.
  The permissions for Vstor is set to NFS.
  The permissions for Wstor (SMB only) is set to SMB. 

• ZFS boxes: total 1.5PB capacity for about 7 groups (about 3PB if including replication). Snapshot+Replication.
  It has NFSv4 ACL. Low performance.

Other thoughts:

• If a file created in Panasas is enhanced with the PanFS ACL, the ACL might not survive if the file is copied to a different storage system (Vstor or ZFS).

• Running Linux file permissions would be faster than running a series of setfacl.

• We can create multiple groups (e.g. <PI's CaseID>-pp, ...) for specific group access to limit the data exposure.

• We can probably set data/archived folders that are non-changeable other than by the admins. Probably this should include most of the files.

• We can set /home folders that have full user access, that hopefully are not that big - because most data is being kept elsewhere.

• There is an ACL option on the HDFS, but I am not sure if it is enabled.