[Lustre-discuss] ioDrive from Fusion-IO as an MDT?

[Chris Worley]

I've visited their headquarters, and they're a very much Linux-savvy
organization.

As an ext3 or XFS fs, they get 700MB/s out of one ioDrive... with
three in a single system MD raided together they were getting 2GB/s
out of IOZone atop an XFS fs.  It is just presented as a block device.

It's an associative memory, so they have a special fs tailored to
using it (and bypass the fs unnecessarily turning names into block
addresses).  That fs gets 800MB/s under IOZone (with one "disk").
Since the fs layer is somewhat independent in Lustre, I thought that
might be a great optimization for this hardware.  They probably won't
focus on the HPC market, as they are probably going after bigger
fish... so this might be something the community has to do if it's
going to get done.

Big issues w/ SSD's include bottlenecks in controllers meant for
spinning drives, and extra device driver layers that do unnecessary
steps like elevator code (which SSD or the ioDrive don't need as seek
time is consistent).  The ioDrive doesn't carry or need this extra
baggage.

I'd like to see some experiment w/ Lustre and ioDrives... especially
in the area of minimizing stripe sizes... since these drives don't
need to work w/ big blocks to get optimal performance.

Chris
On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 12:53 PM, Klaus Steden <klaus.steden at thomson.net> wrote:
>
> Hi Craig,
>
> Assuming it presents itself as a regular LUN to the OS, I don't think it
> would appear to operate any differently than a physical drive. I've always
> been extremely curious to try solid-state disks in a high-performance
> environment, so if anyone's used one of these, I'm dying to hear how it
> worked for you.
>
> cheers,
> Klaus
>
> On 8/8/08 9:31 AM, "Craig Prescott" <prescott at hpc.ufl.edu>did etch on stone
> tablets:
>
>>
>> Hi all;
>>
>> Has anyone ever tried using a Fusion-IO ioDrive as
>> a Lustre MDT?
>>
>> http://www.fusionio.com/products.aspx
>>
>> If so, I'd love to hear your experiences, particularly
>> if you've used one in a production filesystem.  We're using
>> a mirrored pair of SATA disks at present for our MDTs,
>> and interactive response can get pretty crummy when
>> our users perform metadata-heavy workloads.  It seems
>> this product could help us out in that area.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Craig Prescott
>> UF HPC Center
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