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

[Colin Faber]

Hi Greg,

In general like all file systems you're limited to how stable and 
reliable your hardware platform is. If you're building something 
yourself then Lustre becomes much more work. This is due to the need to 
keep up with stability patches as well as addressing issues directly 
related to your use case and hardware profile.

In my opinion lustre is no less stable than any other file system 
technology, especially when you're talking about 1.8 revisions (which 
are very stable) however you have many more things which can go wrong, 
as you're usually talking about many more components which can fail.

A correctly architect cluster with proper fail over environment should 
leave the file system trouble free, unless of course you hit a bug. 
There are many people on this list (including my self) that run Lustre 
as a /home file system without issues, again in most cases issues are 
introduced when you're over taxing your hardware, or you have hardware 
failure and a poor fail over environment.

There are many vendors which can setup a very robust file system for 
you, however again, remember if you're looking for the cheapest option, 
you get what you pay for.

-cf


On 01/17/2013 10:17 AM, greg whynott wrote:
> 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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