[Lustre-discuss] Distributed storage and computing

Tim van Elteren timvanelteren at gmail.com
Mon Oct 28 06:31:04 PDT 2013


Dear Lustre Community,

After researching a number of distributed file systems for deployment in a
production environment with the main purpose of performing both batch and
real-time distributed computing I've identified Lustre as a potential
solution.

The key properties that our system should exhibit:

- an open source, liberally licensed, yet production ready, e.g. a mature, *
reliable*, community and commercially supported solution;
- ability to run on commodity hardware, preferably be designed for it;
- provide high availability of the data with the most focus on reads;
- high scalability, so operation over multiple data centres, possibly on a
global scale;
- removal of single points of failure with the use of replication and
distribution of (meta-)data.

The sensitivity points that were identified, and resulted in the following
questions, are:

1) transparency to the processing layer / application with respect to data
locality, e.g. know where data is physically located on a server level,
mainly for resource allocation and fast processing, high performance, how
can this be accomplished using Lustre?

2) posix compliance, or conformance: hadoop for example isn't posix
compliant by design, what are the pro's and con's? What is Lustre approach
with respect to support for posix operations?

3) mainly with respect to evaluating the production readiness of Lustre,
where is it currently used in production environments and for what specific
usecases it seems most suitable? Are there any known issues / common
pitfalls and workarounds available?

4) Finally what would be the most compelling reason to go for Lustre and
not for the alternatives? what are the advantages for example with respect
to Ceph?

I'm looking forward to your replies. Thanks in advance! :)

With kind regards,

Tim van Elteren
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