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

[Jonathan Billings]

On Mon, Mar 05, 2012 at 05:47:12PM -0500, Prentice Bisbal wrote:
> I'm not doubting that - I've heard good things about Isilon.
> 
> Unless your Isilon is using pNFS, the *NFS* is not parallel. The data
> access within the Isilon between the head unit and the disks might be
> parallel, but clients accessing the data on the Isilon are not doing it
> in parallel, therefore the NFS itself is not parallel. And this is the
> bottleneck that parallel filesystems are designed to deal with.

I can't speak as an expert, but I believe that the isilon head node
plays games with DNS such that the the client load is spread across
several nodes.  Individial clients connections aren't parallel, but
access through the head node isn't the single point of failure.

-- 
Jonathan Billings <jsbillin at umich.edu>
College of Engineering - CAEN - Unix and Linux Support