[lustre-discuss] Lustre 2.7 deployment issues

Mohr Jr, Richard Frank (Rick Mohr) rmohr at utk.edu
Fri Dec 4 10:46:42 PST 2015


> On Dec 4, 2015, at 12:41 PM, Massimo Sgaravatto <massimo.sgaravatto at pd.infn.it> wrote:
> 
> Thanks Rick for this useful summary !
> 
> What is not clear to me if maintenance releases will eventually be available again or if people running production systems will have to choose among:
> 
> 1) Buy Intel support contract
> 2) Move to another filesystem


First, keep in mind that just because there is not an official maintenance release does not necessarily mean that the latest feature release is wildly unstable.  There is a significant amount of testing that is performed for each Lustre release, and there are a lot of people using Lustre in production who have a vested interest in making sure Lustre will work.  The lack of a maintenance release should not cause you to immediately jump ship for another file system.  IMHO, if you need a free scalable parallel file system, Lustre is still your best choice.

With that being said, I wish I could give you a clearer picture of where Lustre maintenance releases are headed.  That is a question I am also very interested in.  Maybe we will see option #3: Community members publish lists of patches they are running in production.  If a large site is running a Lustre 2.7 file system and has applied a set of patches they think makes it sufficiently stable, maybe small sites could use Lustre 2.7.0 + (list_of_big_site_patches) as an informal 2.7.1 release.  

The balance between features and stability is a complex topic, but it is one that Lustre developers care about.  For a recent thread on this topic, take a look at:

http://lists.lustre.org/pipermail/lustre-devel-lustre.org/2015-November/002767.html

--
Rick Mohr
Senior HPC System Administrator
National Institute for Computational Sciences
http://www.nics.tennessee.edu



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