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

[Phil Meyer]

On 03/05/2012 02:28 PM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:
> 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.
>

NFS on Isilon servers IS parallel, and IS fault tolerant.  The 
connection is a single connection, yes, but underneath it is 
distributed, and they offer several methods to help load balance the 
clients.

I don't mean to sell Isilon here, but it is very good for what it does.