[Lustre-discuss] SAN, shared storage, iscsi using lustre?

Alex linux at vfemail.net
Tue Aug 12 09:20:29 PDT 2008


Hello experts,

I read that raid software on linux is not cluster aware, so i'm tried to find 
a solution to join together more computers to form a shared file system and 
build a SAN (correctly if i am wrong), avoiding usage of raid software... but, 
suddenly i discovered lustre which seems to be exaclty what i need.

It is well supported on linux (centos5/rhel5) and has support for 
raid/lvm/iscsi (as i read in FAQ), is scaling well and is easy to extend.

My problem comes below:

Let say that I have:
- N computers (N>8) sharing their volumes (volX, where X=N). Each volX is 
arround 120GB.
- M servers (M>3) - which are accessing a clustered shared storage volume 
(read/write)
- Other regular computers which are available if required.

Now, I want:
- to build somehow a cluster file system on top of vol1, vol2, ... volN 
volumes with high data availability and without a single point of failure.
- resulted logical volume to be used on SERVER1, SERVER2 and SERVER3 
(read/write access at the same time)

Questions:

- Using lustre, can i join all volX (exported via iscsi) toghether in one 
bigger volume (using raid/lvm) and have a fault-tolerance SHARED STORAGE 
(failure of a single drive (volX) or server (computerX) should not bring down 
the storage usage)?

- I have one doubt regarding lustre: i saw that is using EXT3 on top, which is 
a LOCAL FILE SYSTEM not suitable for SHARED STORAGE (different 
computers accesing the same volume and write at the same time on it).

- So, using lustre's patched kernels and tools, ext3 become suitable for 
SHARED STORAGE?

Regards,
Alx



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