> I am afraid none of the current solutions support the > kind of configuration > you are looking for. What we have is PxFS and QFS. > PxFS is single > server and works only on non-distributed storage. QFS > needs direct > connection to storage on all nodes it is mounted on.
This brings about another question: what is the difference between CFS and PxFS? > Of the fs solutions Sun has, only Lustre provides the > distributed storage > support you are looking for. However Lustre and > cluster does not play > together yet. Any rough estimates as to when Lustre might make it into the Sun Cluster product? The problem is shared storage. Currently, fiber channel arrays seem to be the only viable solution. However, this technology is, in my experience, extremely fragile and unreliable; to get any kind of scalability, fiber channel switches are required, and this is where the "fun" begins: vendor finger pointing, write errors on FC virtual LUNs, ..., and it goes on and on and on. And the technology is way overpriced and too expensive. > One approach I have heard people talk about is to > export the local > storage via iscsi and create a mirror with those > devices. Various failure > modes are hairy unless you know exactly what you are > doing. This might work, however, iSCSI seems to have one drawback, and that is fixed LUN size. If I ran out of space on that iSCSI LUN, and had to grow it, things would get complicated really fast. However, it might be a viable approach for now; and it seems doable for my little 2 node V100 setup. With the advent of e-SATA, before I invest the funds into such an enclosure, does anyone know whether it is possible to connect an e-SATA enclosure to two separate hosts (not the aforementioned V100s), and have both hosts utilize the storage? This would basically be a similar approach to a fiber channel array, but the cost would be about factor of 10x less. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
