the storage space on sto3 is based on ZFS, a volume-manager/filesystem original designed by Sun Microsystems, and only recently released as openSource. ZFS is well tested and a standard package on Ubuntu. You don't need expensive RAID controllers for ZFS, because RAID is natively included in ZFS. The ZFS pool is called data, and has the currently those datasets defined:

root@sto3:~# zfs list -r -o quota,mountpoint,sharenfs,sharesmb,compressratio data/home
QUOTA  MOUNTPOINT              SHARENFS  SHARESMB  RATIO
  10T  /data/home              on        on        1.44x
 500G  /data/home/apresenti    on        on        5.82x
 500G  /data/home/ejanssens    on        on        1.01x
 500G  /data/home/jdbeen3      on        on        1.02x
 500G  /data/home/jsanctorum2  on        on        1.01x
   1G  /data/home/ugent        on        on        1.00x
   1T  /data/home/wels         on        on        1.20x
 500G  /data/home/xre          on        on        1.02x

For every user we create, we will also create a dataset for that user, /data/home/<username> . This new dataset will inherit most of the settings of /data/home, like sharenfs and sharesmb (sharing via nfs and sharing via samba). You can also specify quota for the new dataset.
We will provide an extra script for creating a user with all the correct settings. See User administration