[Lustre-discuss] Lustre on WAN

[Shi Jin]

Hi there,

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.

Thank you very much.
-- 
Shi Jin, Ph.D.
Cloud Architect
Cybera Inc.
3-43 Computing Science Center
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB, Canada
780-232-7681
shi.jin at cybera.ca
http://www.ualberta.ca/~sjin1/