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

[Mike Berg]

Lustre relies on the the underlying storage and network architectures  
and follows the same type of requirements as any mission critical  
service. There are many mission critical uses of Lustre, a simple one  
is in weather forecasting.

Lustre itself is designed to have no single points of failure,  
assuming the storage and network also provide the same. See http://wiki.lustre.org/index.php?title=Recovery_Overview 
  for how Lustre handles different types of failures to protect your  
data.

Regards,
Mike Berg
Sr. Lustre Solutions Engineer
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Office/Fax: (303) 547-3491
E-mail:  Mike.Berg at Sun.Com

On May 14, 2008, at 12:21 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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