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

[Aaron Knister]

I don't know if this helps, but we're running two lustre filesystems  
(soon to be three) totalling around 200TB. We only backup one  
filesystem that's 50TB. We're trusting lustre for 150TB of data that  
if it disappears would hurt and probably cripple us as an  
organization. I trust lustre. Does that help?

-Aaron

On May 14, 2008, at 2:21 PM, jrs wrote:

> 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
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Aaron Knister
Systems Administrator
Center for Research on Environment and Water

(301) 595-7000
aaron at iges.org