[Lustre-discuss] Fwd: Simple servers as storage nodes

Peter Grandi pg_lus at lus.for.sabi.co.UK
Sat Apr 4 15:22:10 PDT 2009


[ ... ]

> What I'm actually look for, is a solution that can take plain
> Linux boxes, and unify their space into a single volume, with
> optional replication of every file.

Well, this quest is rather vague -- "unify their space" does
that means the data space or the name space? Does the "optional
replication of every file" mean block level or file level
replication?

Lustre as to those unifies name spaces, sort of unifies data
space when striping (on a rather coarse level), and does no
replication, leaving it to the underlying storage (sw or hw)
layer, and several people use MD/DM RAID1 or DRBD to do that.

I have done a summary here:

  http://www.sabi.co.uk/blog/0804apr.html#080417

And this is a nice presentation that I used to push it within my
organization (even if the final achitecture was quite different):

  http://HEPiX.CASPUR.IT/storage/hep_pdf/2008/Spring/LustreClusterGSI.pdf

and I think that the "Even Cheaper" alternative they describe
is fully "generic box" based.

> So my question is, whether Lustre able to do so without any
> special hardware.

Well, Lustre works pretty well without special hardware (but
what does "special" mean?).

Conversely, if one wants a distributed/parallel/chunked file
system there is not much else in the "production ready" and
"free software" areas. I have read good things about GlusterFS
as a possible alternative with a somewhat different profile
though, and I am going to look into it.



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