[rhelv6-list] Distributed parallel fault-tolerant file systems

[Prentice Bisbal]

On 03/05/2012 04:11 PM, Phil Meyer wrote:
> On 03/05/2012 09:34 AM, Bohmer, Andre ten wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Any advise or experience from production systems regarding distributed
>> parallel fault-tolerant file systems like Lustre ?
>> We would like to offer high performance, redundant storage via nfs
>> and cifs
>> from Redhat servers.
>>
>> At this we've HP's XP9000 Ibrix in use, but performance is not all that
>> great.
>>
>
> My test results are nearly 2 years old by now, but at that time we
> concluded that, for NFS, the very best performing and low
> administration solution was Isilon.
>
> Need more space?  Drop in a storage module and its online in~60
> seconds.  Performance starting to lag a bit under load? Drop in a CPU
> module and its online in ~60 seconds.
>
> More expensive than any home grown, for sure, but well worth it in my
> opinion.
>
> Two years now in a very heavily used environment without an issue.


NFS is not a parallel filesystem, and it's not fault-tolerant, which
were the OP's requirements. NFS is fine for most day-to-day use (that's
why it's so ubiquitous), but when you have 100+ nodes accessing the
server at once, you can see it's weaknesses, which is why filesystems
like Lustre and PVFS started appeariing soon after Linux clusters came
onto the scene.

--
Prentice