[Lustre-discuss] Help needed for an upcoming HPC project

[Jim Garlick]

If I were purchasing 800TB of storage for Lustre soon, I would want
to take into consideration the fact that ZFS is the planned back end
file system for Lustre in the next year or so.

>From what I understand, the best configuration for ZFS is lots of 
independent disks with ZFS doing RAID in software.  The thumper provides
this but with no ability to fail the disks over to another node.

We have used DDN S2A fibre-channel attached storage in our large Lustre
file systems to date.  These are expensive, I guess because of the 
hardware RAID implementation, which is not needed with ZFS.  However, 
we don't have to worry about JBOD enclosure management, detecting failed 
disks, etc. because this is all handled by the S2A firmware.

So it seems like a configuration based on dual-hosted SAS JBOD's may
be the way of the future, but I wouldn't do 800 TB of that without a good
plan for enclosure and drive hardware management!

Maybe Sun can help us out here with a supported product since they have
taken over CFS and are also in the storage/ZFS business.  (It must run Linux
though :-)

Jim

On Sun, 21 Oct 2007, Mertol Ozyoney wrote:

> Hi all;
>
>
>
> One of our HPC customers will be adding 800 TB of storage to their HPC
> environment.
>
>
>
> I am in need of some expert advice regarding following questions.
>
>
>
> .         I know that some installiations have used Sun thumper X4500's ,
> I'd like to learn pro's of cons of using Sun X4500's
>
> .         If I use X4500 how can I provide redundancy ? What happens if a
> node fails and how can I restore the node ?
>
> .         What are the supported backup applications ? (Veritas, legato
> etc..) Can we use incremantal backups on lustre ?
>
>
>
> regards
>
>
>
>
> <http://www.sun.com/> http://www.sun.com/emrkt/sigs/6g_top.gif
>
> Mertol Ozyoney
> Storage Practice - Sales Manager
>
> Sun Microsystems, TR
> Istanbul TR
> Phone +902123352200
> Mobile +905339310752
> Fax +902123352222
> Email  <mailto:Ayca.Yalcin at Sun.COM> mertol.ozyoney at Sun.COM
>
>
>
>
>
>