Google Service Team optimizes Workspace to meet storage quota
Since I started, we’ve been trying to build a sustainable model where the right data is stored in the right place.
Chris Shearer
Google Service Owner
Chris Shearer is no stranger to Google Workspace. When he joined OIT last December as the Google Service Owner, he had more than 11 years of Google admin experience.
In his new role, he works closely with the Google Service Team (GST) to help prepare the campus to meet Google’s free storage quota of 1.4 petabytes (PB) by Nov. 20, 2024.
For 14 years, campus IT users have benefitted from the convenience of storing and accessing all of their content — roughly 5.5 PB of files, photos and videos — in Google Workspace. However, Google’s decision to end unlimited content storage for all its customers in late 2020 necessitated a shift in storage use.
“Because Google storage has been unlimited, we have been putting everything into Google,” said Shearer.” “Since I started, we’ve been trying to build a sustainable model where the right data is stored in the right place.”
Google Workspace, which offers productivity and collaboration tools like Gmail, Meet and Chat, Drive and Calendar, was never designed to be a large-scale storage solution.
The primary objective now is to minimize the volume of non-day-to-day data in Google Workspace, Shearer said. For instance, large datasets, research storage, video and images, data that meet the qualification of a grant and financial records are data types that shouldn’t be stored in Google.
According to Shearer, the Google Workspace storage project is an integral part of a strategic effort to assess current practices, explore alternatives and establish best practices for all data storage on campus.
Reducing Our Digital Wolf Print
During this fiscal year, Shearer said the GST took several important steps to help campus users reduce their storage in Google Workspace byte by byte. The team:
Set quotas for all campus users in August 2023, with 100 GB for faculty and staff; 15 GB for students and shared drives; and 5 GB for generic and other accounts, including retirees and vendors. Approximately 3,000 users were above quota and received a temporary exception.
Collaborated with local IT staff to help users over quota reduce unnecessary storage and also move archival and research storage into more appropriate locations such as NC State Research Storage.
Removed exceptions for undergraduates and enforced a 15-gigabyte quota for those users on June 1, 2024. Exceptions for graduate students will be removed on Sept. 3. The team has plans to remove 100 terabyte exceptions for staff at the start of the new fiscal year.
Developed and implemented ongoing reduction initiatives, including removing storage from former students and employees, as well as abandoned or unused shared drives.
According to Shearer, these initiatives led directly to a 40% decrease in storage for the 2023-2024 year, reducing the university data storage from 5.2 PB to 3.11 PB.
“Realistically, it’s going to take everyone to get to the quota; it will be challenging,” Shearer added.
To reach the university’s 1.4 PB quota, campus users should continue to move research-related content into Research Storage, avoid using Google to store archives and backups, and use tools like the NC State Drive Inventory Add-on to identify and remove unnecessary files, he said.
