Thursday, July 31, 2008

Here's the Situation...

Like all VRL's, we need server space. It would be awesome if I could walk into the office one day and find the IT Fairy left me some under my mousepad. It should be simple, just call IT, say I need space, and they say OK and it will cost this much to maintain. Cool. But for some reason, it's just not that easy. I could just set up a computer in the VRL and use that as the server, and network the other computers. Nope. No peer-to-peer connections allowed. Thanks Napster. I've been told that I can buy a server, and IT'd be more than happy to work with me. Chair says nope. No money for that. So no peer-to-peer, no space, no server. And the magic solution has to come out of my measly budget. What's a VRC to do?

Think outside the box.

I've seen a few interesting options that I'm seriously considering. Amazon's got an interesting sideline going with offering to host server space with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Windows Skydrive is another option. It's in Beta, so that kind of worries me that it won't stay around, but I think that one's free. FREE!

So I'm hoping to implement something soon, since the fall semester's coming quickly. not necessarily for faculty use yet, but to at least get something out there to show that we are indeed making progress.

I'd be curious if anyone else has considered these options--are they all you hoped and dreamed for?!

Nugget

UPDATE TO POST: I noticed that Skydrive has a limit of 5GB now, not sure if that's a recent change, but there it is nonetheless.

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