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

[greg whynott]

Hi Charles,

  I received a few off list challenging email messages along with a few
fishing ones,  but its all good.   its interesting how a post asking a
question can make someone appear angry.  8)

Our IO profiles from the different segments of our business do vary
greatly.   The HPC is more or less the typical load you would expect to
see,  depending on which software is in use for the for the job being ran.
      We have hundreds of artists and administrative staff who use the file
system in a variety of ways.   Some examples would include but not limited
to:  saving out multiple revisions of photoshop documents (typically in the
hundreds of megs to +1gig range),   video editing (stereoscopic 2k and 4k
images(again from 10's 100's to gigs in size) including uncompressed
video,  excel, word and similar files,  thousands of project files (from
software such as Maya,  Nuke and similar)  these also vary largely in size,
from 1 to thousands of megs in size.

The intention is keep our data bases and VM requirements on the existing
file system which is comprised of about 100 10k SAS drives,  it works well.

We did consider GPFS but that consideration went out the door once I
started talking to them and hammering in some numbers into their online
calculator.  Things got a bit crazy quickly.   They have different pricing
for the different types and speeds of Intel CPUs.  I got the feeling they
were trying to squeeze every penny out of customers they could.  felt very
Brocade-ish and left a bad taste with us.   wouldn't of been much of a
problem as some other shops I've worked at,  but here we do have a finite
budget to work within.

The NAS vendors could all be considered scale out I suspect.   All 3 can
scale out the storage and front end.  NA C-mode can have up to 24 heads,
Blue Arc goes up to 4 or 8 depending on the class,  Isilon can go up to 24
nodes or more as well if memory serves me correctly,  and they all have a
single name space solution in place.   They each have their limits,   but
for our use case they are really subjective.   We will not hit the limits
of their scalability before we are considering a fork lift refresh.  In our
view,  for what they offer it is perty much a wash for them - any would
meet our needs.  NetApp still has a silly agg/vol size limit,  at least it
is up to 90TB now (from 9 in the past(formatted fs use))..  in April it is
suppose to go much higher.

 The block storage idea in the mix - since all our HPC is linux,  they all
would become luster clients.   To provide a gateway into the luster storage
for none linux/luster hosts the thinking was a clustered pair of linux
boxes running SAMBA/NFS which were also Luster clients.    Its just an idea
being bounced around at this point.  The data serving requirements of the
non HPC parts of the business are much less.   The video editors most
likely would stay on our existing storage solution as that is working out
very well for them, but even if we did put them onto the Luster FS,  I
think they would be fine.  based on that, it didn't seem so crazy to
consider block access in this method.   that said,  I think we would be one
of the first in M&E to do so,  pioneers if you will...


diversify - we will end up in the same boat for the same reasons.


thanks Charles,
greg






On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 2:20 PM, Hammitt, Charles Allen <
chammitt at email.unc.edu> wrote:

>  ** **
>
> 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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