[Lustre-discuss] Gluster then DRBD now Lustre?

[Brian J. Murrell]

On Mon, 2008-06-16 at 10:34 -0500, nathan at robotics.net wrote:
> 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.

I will disclaim off the top that I know nothing about Gluster...

> Our day one config is two servers with 10TB each in NYC and SJC. 

These are your "file servers"?  Are they meant to be servers for users
local (i.e. on a LAN) to them?  NYC == New York City?  What is SJC?

> Originally the plan was to active/active mirror them,

You want to mirror these two machines, in real time, over a long
distance?

> but even with gig e 
> the delay kills your write speed.

Of course.  With real mirroring, your writes are going to be as slow as
it takes the data to travel the link and be written to media as any
reliable mirroring solution requires that both sides of the mirror be
written before the writer is allowed to call the write() complete.

> 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.

I'm not following this.  If the two sites are active/active mirrored,
why do you need scripts to copy data.  I must be misunderstanding
something about your scenario.

> 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

There is no "OFED 3".  Perhaps you mean 1.3?

> Anyway, my question is should I run Luster

Lustre.

> instead of DRBD and is there any 
> time frame for RAID 6 like functionally out of Lustre?

There is no RAID functionality at all in Lustre.  I don't think I
understand your use scenario well enough to make any other
recommendations.

> 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.

Correct.

>  I have scripts that I use to build stuff and this 
> is a big pain....

Yes, systems like OpenWRT do similar things.  I'm afraid I have no
solution for this problem.  I certainly have not tried it, but perhaps
you can analyse the SDLC log-in and download process and automate it
with your account credentials.  Wget or CURL should be able to simulate
the process a browser would go through.  Likely you have to pay
attention to, retrieve, store and send cookies throughout the process.

b.

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