Hello (and a special hello to all my ex-co-workers from the CFS days :) The company where I work now has grown fast in the past year and we suddenly find ourselves in need of a lot of storage. For 5 years the company ran on a 60gig server, last year we got a 1TB RAID that is now almost full. In 1-2 years we could easily be using 10-15TB of storage.
Instead of just adding another 1TB server, I need to plan for a more scalable solution. Immediately Lustre came to mind, but I'm wondering about the performance. Basically our company does niche web-hosting for "Creative Professionals" so we need fast access to the data in order to have snappy web services for our clients. Typically these are smaller files (2MB pictures, 50MB videos, .swf files, etc.). Also I'm wondering about the best way set this up in terms of speed and ease of growth. I want the web-servers and the storage pool to be independent of each other. So I can add web-servers as the web traffic increases, and add more storage ass our storage needs grow. We have the option of an MD3000 or MD3000i for back-end storage. I was thinking initially we could start with 2 servers, both attached to the storage array. setup as OSS' and functioning as (load balanced) web-servers as well. In the future I could separate this out so that we have the web-servers on the "front line" mounting the data from the OSS' which will be on a private (gigE) network. Now, it's been years since I've played with Lustre, I'm sure some stuff will come back to me as I start using it again, other things I'll probably have to re-learn. I wanted to get some input from the Lustre community on whether or not this seems like a reasonable use for Lustre? Are there alternatives out there which might fit my needs more? (specifically speed and a shared storage pool). Also, what kind of performance can I expect, am I out of touch to expect something similar to a directly attached RAID array? I appreciate any and all feedback, suggestions, comments etc. Thanks, - Nick -- Nick Jennings Senior Programmer & Systems Administrator Creative Motion Design [email protected] _______________________________________________ Lustre-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss
