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

[Peter Grandi]

>> Can anyone tell if regular servers can be used as the storage
>> nodes?

> A whitebox PC with an IDE disk in it *could* be a Lustre
> server, yes.  It won't be a well performing server though

I'd think that Sun X4500s (Thumpers) would make for very good
Lustre servers. But my boss went for DDN 9000s instead, too bad.

> and it won't enjoy the benefits of Lustre's failover abilities.

>> Or any other solution (SAN/NAS) has to be used as the storage
>> space?

NAS is obviously inappropriate for Lustre storage :-).

> Shared storage enables a failover configuration to be built.
> Non-shared storage doesn't.

I always ask myself why so many people think that OSS and path
failover is what matters. To me what matters is disk failover,
and having redundant frontends and paths to shared disks is
nowhere as useful as having redundant disk subsystems. Shared
storage is a problem, not a solution.

Given that sensible people use RAID10 (http://WWW.BAARF.com/)
anyhow having two DRBD-mirrored fully replicated storage systems
seems wonderful to me.

Lustre, Thumpers, RAID10 over DRBD seems the winning combination
to me for for large/fast/reliable/cost effective storage pools,
with fairly few exceptions. Consider this:

  http://www.mail-archive.com/lustre-discuss%40lists.lustre.org/msg02296.html