[Lustre-discuss] Lustre on WAN

[Andreas Dilger]

On Mar 26, 2009  07:53 -0700, Shi Jin wrote:
> I am working on the storage solution for our Cybera cloud in Alberta, Canada. 
> After testing several distributed file systems such as MooseFS,
> Tahoe and Lustre, I finally realized that Lustre is the best among
> them. However, Lustre is originally designed to target at HPC clusters,
> i.e., systems on a single LAN environment. On the other hand, the cloud
> we are building is physically distributed at different cities in the
> province of Alberta. I did a preliminary test of Lustre between the two
> Universities at Calgary and Edmonton, the performance is impressively
> good, partly due to the fast network we are running in the province. I
> also know that Lustre can use Kerberos to do secure authentication,
> which is critical in a WAN environment.
> 
> Everything said, I still would like to hear some insider thoughts on
> the possibility of implementing Lustre as a distributed storage solution
> for a physically distributed cloud system.

This is very similar to the environment that is being used at Indiana
University.  They have the Lustre servers at a central site, but
several labs/campuses in other cities are mounting the filesystem and
they can saturate 10GigE links between the sites.

Note that Kerberos is not yet available in a production release, though
an preview release is available in CVS (use the v1_9_166 tag).  Until
kerberos is available you should use a VPN or physically secure link
for the WAN connection.

Depending on your level of committment to deploying a Lustre solution,
there is the annual Lustre User Group in San Francisco on April 16, 17,
at which many Lustre customers will be attending.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.