[Lustre-discuss] Can lustre be trusted to keep my data safe?

[jrs]

Greetings all,

I just spoke with someone at a large computing company who
has a close relationship with lustre/sun (a reseller, I guess).
This person described lustre as being something that Sun
"would not recommend for mission critical use."

Can this be true?

I work for a small/medium company that does image processing.
We have about 700TB of data presently and might be at 2PB within
the next couple of years.  Owing to the amount of data we don't
make backups for most of it and trust raid 6 on our hardware raid
boxes (nexsan Satabeast) to fail more slowly than we can replace
disks.  Over the last couple of years we've had great luck and,
I believe, have never lost data owing to a failure with this
hardware (software or human error is another matter ;-).
However, the unbacked up data is "mission critical."  Though
it can, probably, all be reconstructed or reacquired, as a practical
matter losing a significant quantity of this data could be
catastrophic for our business.

So, what do you think, can lustre be trusted to keep our
data safe at our company?  Assume in answering that we have
failover working properly.  We can also withstand some blocking
of the filesystem while a failover event completes, i.e., not
having the filesystem available for some amount of time is
not a problem, but having directory important-data/ disappear
is a HUGE problem.

Thanks for any help or guidance,

John