I built in an incentive structure. Each grant includes a certain amount of "overhead" in addition to what the researcher requests, which keeps the lights on, pa

I built in an incentive structure. Each grant includes a certain amount of "overhead" in addition to what the researcher requests, which keeps the lights on, pays for common infrastructure. I negotiated to fund a big portion of ongoing costs for data storage out of the overhead. (Capital costs were mostly paid out of funds from a large settlement, private grants, etc.) We found that when there were no limits to usage, researchers would just duplicate their data over and over with tiny changes, which was incredibly costly. To solve this problem, I tried giving "monopoly money" to the professors, allowing them to trade data storage and cluster time for favors, analysis, and so on. For the researchers who didn't need as much storage, they could give their excess up. For those who gobbled up storage, they could "buy" the excess. It ended up failing because I didn't have backup from leadership to say "no" when I was asked to do things that were irresponsible: Yes, you can buy a 2TB HDD for $100. No, that isn't the same as 2TB of storage on an enterprise-level storage array, clustered, with local mirroring, offsite tape backup, etc. No, I won't plug your 2TB USB HDD into my compute cluster.