[Lustre-discuss] is Luster ready for prime time?

Hammitt, Charles Allen chammitt at email.unc.edu
Thu Jan 17 11:20:10 PST 2013


Somewhat surprised that no one has responded yet; although it’s likely that the responses would be rather subjective…including mine, of course!

Generally I would say that it would be interesting to know more about your datasets and intended workload; however, you mention this is to be used as your day-to-day main business storage…so I imagine those characteristics would greatly vary… mine certainly do; that much is for sure!

I don’t really think uptime would be as much an issue here; there are lots of redundancies, recovery mechanisms, and plenty of stable branches to choose from…the question becomes what are the feature-set needs, performance usability for different file types and workloads, and general comfort level with greater complexity and somewhat less resources.  That said, I’d personally be a bit wary of using it as a general filesystem for all your needs.


I do find it interesting that your short list is a wide range mix of storage and filesystem types; traditional NAS, scale-out NAS, and then some block storage with a parallel filesytem in Lustre.  Why no GPFS on the list for comparison?

I currently manage, or have used in the past [bluearc], all the storage / filesystems and more from your list.  The reason being is that different storage and filesystems components have some things they are good at… while other things they might not be as good at doing.  So I diversify by putting different storage/filesystem component pieces in the areas where they excel at best…



Regards,

Charles



From: lustre-discuss-bounces at lists.lustre.org [mailto:lustre-discuss-bounces at lists.lustre.org] On Behalf Of greg whynott
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2013 12:18 PM
To: lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
Subject: [Lustre-discuss] is Luster ready for prime time?

Hello,

just signed up today, please forgive me if this question has been covered recently.  - in a bit of a rush to get an answer on this as we need to make a decision soon,  the idea of using luster was thrown into the mix very late in the decision making process.

We are looking to procure a new storage solution which will predominately be used for HPC output but will also be used as our main business centric storage for day to day use.  Meaning the file system needs to be available 24/7/365.    The last time I was involved in considering Luster was about 6 years ago and it was at that time being considered for scratch space for HPC usage only.
Our VMs and databases would remain on non-luster storage as we already have that in place and it works well.    The luster file system potentially would have everything else.  Projects we work on typically take up to 2 years to complete and during that time we would want all assets to remain on the file system.
Some of the vendors on our short list include HDS(Blue Arc), Isilon and NetApp.    Last week we started bouncing the idea of using Luster around.   I'd love to use it if it is considered stable enough to do so.

your thoughts and/or comments would be greatly appreciated.  thanks for your time.

greg


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