[Lustre-discuss] one server node fails, its all dead?

[Brian J. Murrell]

On Mon, 2009-02-02 at 15:23 -0600, Robert Minvielle wrote:
> 
> So, if I have a server that goes down, the clients are out of luck.

Without failover configured, yes.

> I have
> a hard time believing this is "acceptable".

Well, that's completely subjective of course.  If it's not acceptable to
you, then you can configure a second node that has access to the (i.e.
shared) storage (i.e. OSTs or MDTs) for the failed node and service will
continue on after the clients discover that the primary has failed and
resume operations with the secondary.  All of this happens transparent
to the applications running on the clients.

> Ok, so it is "as good as" NFS,

If you don't configure failover, yes.  If you configure failover then
it's better.

> but I mean really, if a single storage unit fails all of my clients can do
> nothing?

No, that's not true.  Even if you don't have failover configured, any
clients that do not attempt to access any files (or file stripes) on
that failed OST don't even notice and continue on merrily.

> Am I missing something here or is this by design?

It's design.

> Contacting Sun to ask about support took forever. At least four days for them
> to just call me back and tell me they could not give me a price without 
> knowing how much storage I have (ugh, a pay per byte system, great). 

No.  You must have misunderstood.  We don't charge "per byte".  IIUC,
support costs are a function of how many OSSes you have.

b.

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