[Lustre-discuss] Gluster then DRBD now Lustre?

nathan at robotics.net nathan at robotics.net
Mon Jun 16 08:34:59 PDT 2008


I have been spending a lot of time with Gluster, I like it a lot, on the 
surface it looks great. I like that I can get RAID 6 like functionality 
out of it, however after testing found it is not just ready for prime 
time.

Our day one config is two servers with 10TB each in NYC and SJC. 
Originally the plan was to active/active mirror them, but even with gig e 
the delay kills your write speed. Since Gluster did not work out we 
started testing DRBD. The plan was to active/active mirror the two servers 
in each site and then setup scripts to copy the data we need between 
sites. When we need more servers, we would add them in groups of two and 
use Gluster (hoping it is ready in 4 - 6 months) to unify the DRBD groups 
into a larger shared namespace.

This is working in a test setup, however there are some down sides. The 
first is that DRBD only supports IP, so we have to run IPoIB over our 
our infiniband adapters, not an ideal solution. The second is that we are 
using infiniband adapters on centos 5.1 xen kernel and can't bind them 
together because we need OFED 3 and it removed bind because it now is in 
the kernel, but not in 2.6.18 we need for xen.

Anyway, my question is should I run Luster instead of DRBD and is there any 
time frame for RAID 6 like functionally out of Lustre?

P.S. Once long long ago and far far away lustre had links that you could 
download software from. Today the only way I see to do it is to log into 
sun and then download. I have scripts that I use to build stuff and this 
is a big pain....

><>
Nathan Stratton                                CTO, BlinkMind, Inc.
nathan at robotics.net                         nathan at blinkmind.com
http://www.robotics.net                        http://www.blinkmind.com



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