[Linux-cluster] GPFS??

[Hansjörg Maurer]

Hi

GPFS runs very well on RHEL3 and RHEL4.
It is officially supported from IBM only on selected Hardware Devices.

We did a feature and performance comparison of GFS and GPFS as part of a
cluster project.

It has been  published in the german computer magazine iX in 10/2005.
Just a brief overview:

Our impression was, that gpfs is very scalable (up to 2^99 Byte even on
Linux Kernel 2.4 compared to 16 TByte with GFS)
and has more features than gfs 6.1  has at the moment.

It has cluster-wide snapshots and the possibility to  store data
transparently redundant
(like raid1) on diffent storage systems.
It could be expanded and rebalanced online, which means, that data are
restriped over
the added storage device which improves overall IO performance by
addinge devices.
It could be extended to LAN with Multipathing...

We discoverd some gpfs issues with mmaped files and an undocumented
limit in fcntl locks per file
(problem with samba tdb files on gpfs) which could be increased.

GFS could be used free and the integration into RHEL is much better
(with GPFS you have to compile a kernel module
on every kernel update or gpfs update).
It is supported by Redhat with no special hardware requirements.

If you need further information on GPFS you can contact me off list,
because it might be off topic on a gfs list :-)


Greetings

Hansjörg


rturnbull schrieb:

> Hello,
>    I sent in a question before about SAN connecting multiple nodes to
> same shared disk.
>
>    I have been doing some reading and came across GPFS (Global
> Parallel File System).  Since I have all this shinny new ibm hardware,
> is this a "free" software filesystem?  Anyone heard of or used this
> technology?
>
> Let me know.
>
> Ryan
>
> -- 
> Linux-cluster mailing list
> Linux-cluster at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-cluster
>

-- 
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Dr.  Hansjoerg Maurer           | LAN- & System-Manager
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