On Feb 2, 2009, at 2:57 PM, Andreas Dilger <[email protected]> wrote: > On Feb 02, 2009 15:23 -0600, Robert Minvielle wrote: >> So, if I have a server that goes down, the clients are out of luck. >> I have >> a hard time believing this is "acceptable". Ok, so it is "as good >> as" NFS, >> but I mean really, if a single storage unit fails all of my clients >> can do >> nothing? Am I missing something here or is this by design? > > It is possible for clients to create new files while a server is down, > but as you can expect it isn't possible to read any data from the > failed > server. In some cases users have used DRBD to do device replication > instead of using shared storage. > >> The real reason >> I ask is that I am testing Lustre against a few other DPFS to see >> if we will >> move to Lustre. So far, some things are nice, and some are not >> nice. Writing >> seems to be faster, but reading is slower (than my other test DPFSs). >> Contacting Sun to ask about support took forever. At least four >> days for them >> to just call me back and tell me they could not give me a price >> without >> knowing how much storage I have (ugh, a pay per byte system, great). > > You can imagine that supporting the largest Lustre filesystem (1300+ > OSTs > with 10PB of storage and 30k+ clients) will take more effort than > supporting > a system with a handful of OSTs and clients. The support price is > not per > client, but rather per-OST, IIRC.
Just to clarify: Lustre support prices are currently based on the number of OSS servers (machines serving OSTs), not the number of OSTs, and not the size of the storage. > >> So, Lustre users, is it worth it? My setup would be 24 OST's with >> about >> 100TB of storage, 10G ethernet, RAID on each OST, at least 20 or so >> clients >> needing pretty fast read/write, connected via 10G ethernet (yes, I >> know I >> need a SAN but the physical locations will not allow it and the >> price is >> prohibitive, hence my looking at DPFSs)... Am I on the right track >> looking >> at Lustre, or should I go elsewhere? I also need commercial support >> of some >> kind (although it seems Sun is unsure of themselves here, they did >> not >> know who to contact when I contacted them "Lustre, we make a product >> called Lustre? Hold please"... > > Well, Sun is a big company, and Lustre was only acquired a year ago > and > does not necessarily generate a high call volume to the L1 support > people, > so they are not necessarily going to have information immediately > handy. > > Note that Lustre itself does NOT need a SAN to work, unlike some other > cluster filesystems. The only SAN requirement is for failover pairs > of > servers. Sun also has low-cost shared storage options for Luster -- search for Sun Storage Cluster. > Cheers, Andreas > -- > Andreas Dilger > Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group > Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc. > > _______________________________________________ > Lustre-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss _______________________________________________ Lustre-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss
