[Lustre-discuss] Performance Expectations of Lustre

[Andreas Dilger]

On Jan 26, 2009  16:51 +0100, Nick Jennings wrote:
>   The company where I work now has grown fast in the past year and we 
> suddenly find ourselves in need of a lot of storage. For 5 years the 
> company ran on a 60gig server, last year we got a 1TB RAID that is now 
> almost full. In 1-2 years we could easily be using 10-15TB of storage.

Nick,
to be honest, I wouldn't necessarily recommend Lustre for a relatively
small installation like this.  The main benefit of using Lustre is
that it scales the IO bandwidth very well with additional OSS nodes,
but more nodes (and more complexity) also add more points of failure.

If you don't need more bandwidth and/or size than can be easily served
from a single node then you can use something like NFS with a single
ext3 16TB filesystem today.

You didn't mention the number of web servers that will be accessing the
filesystem, and of course lots of clients can bring an NFS server to
its knees, so that is definitely also something to consider.

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