[Lustre-devel] [wc-discuss] Re: [Twg] Lustre and cross-platform portability

[Nathan Rutman]

On Mar 16, 2012, at 8:06 AM, Todd, Allen wrote:

> 
> On Friday, March 16, 2012 6:11 AM, Gregory Matthews wrote:
>> why bother having a windows client if you lose the performance? We have
>> windows based detectors and proprietary windows based analysis software
>> that would definitely benefit from higher performance access to lustre
>> file systems but replacing existing CIFS servers for no gain seems a bit
>> pointless.

1. Re-exporting Lustre via CIFS or NFS isn't scalable to very large numbers of Windows clients
2. Re-exporting Lustre via CIFS or NFS can have coherency problems when multiple re-exporters are involved
3. Wide-striped file access would likely have greater performance on a native client than via a re-exported single pipe, for some value of "wide".

> 
>> From the perspective of my firm, the benefit of a windows lustre client (native or fuse-based), even one that performs at 10% or 20% of the linux client, is the improved scalability that it offers.  Our current solution uses 4 samba gateways per hundred windows servers to achieve acceptable bandwidth, but that bandwidth can be cut to an unacceptable trickle if a large wave of native linux clients simultaneously accesses the filesystem.
> 
> We have repeatedly asked our Microsoft HPC contacts to intervene to either fund a native windows client or to get oracle to release the existing one, since scalable storage is a big hole in the Microsoft HPC toolkit.  Obviously, nothing has come out of that.  It seems Microsoft is banking on pNFS, eventually working in this space.
> 
> Allen Todd
> 
> 
> 
> 
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