[Lustre-discuss] What do you think of this idea?

[Andreas Dilger]

On 2010-05-19, at 12:44, David Noriega wrote:
> What if I take a single workstation and attach to it via iSCSI two Drobo disk arrays. Would it be possible to run both the metadata and the object storage off of a single machine? Two maxed out Drobo arrays gets 32TB of space. It costs more but would this be better then adding disks to existing workstations where we cant control the environment(ie users)?

I run in this config for my home system all the time, though it has relatively low load.  If you aren't expecting the maximum performance out of the filesystem, then you can just use any old components to get enough space.  For the extra $500 or so to add a dedicated server node (compared to $3000 for the Drobo enclosures + $2500 for the disks) you may as well avoid sharing this resource.

However, the question arises whether you need Lustre at all, if you are just putting it on a single server?  Nobody can accuse me of being anti-Lustre :-), but it definitely has more complexity than just using a single large filesystem (e.g. XFS) and NFS exporting it, or using rsync + ssh for your backups and not having any network exporting of the filesystem, if that meets your needs just as well.  Lustre is best suited for the case where the performance/space requirements are larger than what a single server can provide, and I don't think that matches your use case very well.

> On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 1:01 PM, hungsheng Tsao <hungsheng.tsao at oracle.com> wrote:
> as playground is  fine.
> even in this type of env , IMHO, u will need to do some raid for 3x2tb ost and mirror  for mds
> Hope that U have enough memory and cpu power and network  for MDS and OST.
> these are dedicate for lustre, u need other compute nodes.
> regards
> 
> 
> 
> On 5/19/2010 1:31 PM, David Noriega wrote:
>> My supervisor has this idea and I would like the input of the Lustre community as we are still very new to Lustre. 
>> 
>> We have 7 workstations, and the idea was to put into them 3 2TB drives, for a total of 42TB, and set them up as object servers, and another workstation as a meta data server. How feasible is this idea? And I know of the downfalls, what if a student reboots a machine, etc, but baring those events, would this setup work?
>> 
>> David
>> 
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> 
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Cheers, Andreas
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Andreas Dilger
Lustre Technical Lead
Oracle Corporation Canada Inc.