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

[Nicolas Williams]

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 12:56:49PM -0500, David Noriega wrote:
> The idea is to have an extra place to backup our file server. To run
> incremental backups on the weekends. Have a script to check if the
> workstations are online first. Eventually the main fileserver will be
> Lustre, but this would be a duplicate of the fileserver. So our services
> would not be depending on this.

I strongly recommend not building infrastructure services on systems
whose physical security you cannot safeguard.  Your students could do
much worse than merely reboot these workstations...  If you care about
the data, even as a backup (surely you care about having a good backup
when you need it), then should not proceed with your plan.

On the other hand, as a giant scratch space (e.g., for workspaces) that
you don't intend to backup/restore, running a Lustre cluster on those
workstations would be just fine.  It'd also be fine to share scratch
space local storage via NFS and forget clustering.

Nico
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