Re: [lustre-discuss] [HPDD-discuss] Lustre Server Sizing

2015-07-21 Thread Indivar Nair
Hi Scott,

The 3 - SAN Storages with 240 disks each has its own 3 NAS Headers (NAS
Appliances).
However, even with 240 10K RPM disk and RAID50, it is only providing around
1.2 - 1.4GB/s per NAS Header.

There is no clustered file system, and each NAS Header has its own
file-system.
It uses some custom mechanism to present the 3 file systems as single name
space.
But the directories have to be manually spread across for load-balancing.
As you can guess, this doesn't work most of the time.
Many a times, most of the compute nodes access a single NAS Header,
overloading it.

The customer wants *at least* 9GB/s throughput from a single file-system.

But I think, if we architect the Lustre Storage correctly, with these many
disks, we should get at least 18GB/s throughput, if not more.

Regards,


Indivar Nair


On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 10:15 PM, Scott Nolin scott.no...@ssec.wisc.edu
wrote:

 An important question is what performance do they have now, and what do
 they expect if converting it to Lustre. Our more basically, what are they
 looking for in general in changing?

 The performance requirements may help drive your OSS numbers for example,
 or interconnect, and all kinds of stuff.

 Also I don't have a lot of experience with NFS/CIFS gateways, but that is
 perhaps it's own topic and may need some close attention.

 Scott

 On 7/21/2015 10:57 AM, Indivar Nair wrote:

 Hi ...,

 One of our customers has a 3 x 240 Disk SAN Storage Array and would like
 to convert it to Lustre.

 They have around 150 Workstations and around 200 Compute (Render) nodes.
 The File Sizes they generally work with are -
 1 to 1.5 million files (images) of 10-20MB in size.
 And a few thousand files of 500-1000MB in size.

 Almost 50% of the infra is on MS Windows or Apple MACs

 I was thinking of the following configuration -
 1 MDS
 1 Failover MDS
 3 OSS (failover to each other)
 3 NFS+CIFS Gateway Servers
 FDR Infiniband backend network (to connect the Gateways to Lustre)
 Each Gateway Server will have 8 x 10GbE Frontend Network (connecting the
 clients)

 *Option A*
  10+10 Disk RAID60 Array with 64KB Chunk Size i.e. 1MB Stripe Width
  720 Disks / (10+10) = 36 Arrays.
  12 OSTs per OSS
  18 OSTs per OSS in case of Failover

 *Option B*
  10+10+10+10 Disk RAID60 Array with 128KB Chunk Size i.e. 4MB Stripe
 Width
  720 Disks / (10+10+10+10) = 18 Arrays
  6 OSTs per OSS
  9 OSTs per OSS in case of Failover
  4MB RPC and I/O

 *Questions*
 1. Would it be better to let Lustre do most of the striping / file
 distribution (as in Option A) OR would it be better to let the RAID
 Controllers do it (as in Option B)

 2. Will Option B allow us to have lesser CPU/RAM than Option A?

 Regards,


 Indivar Nair



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Re: [lustre-discuss] [HPDD-discuss] Lustre Server Sizing

2015-07-21 Thread Cowe, Malcolm J
I’ve seen CTDB + Samba deployed on several sites running Lustre. It’s stable in 
my experience, and straightforward to get installed and set up, although the 
process is time-consuming. The most significant hurdle is integrating with AD 
and maybe load balancing for the CTDB servers (RR DNS is the easiest and most 
common solution).

Performance is not nearly as good as for native Lustre client (apart from 
anything else, IIRC, SMB is a “chatty” protocol, esp with xattrs?). One 
downside of CTDB is that Lustre client must be mounted with -oflock in order 
for the recovery lock manager to work. Each individual connection to Samba from 
a Windows client is limited to the bandwidth and single thread performance of 
the CTDB node. Clients remain connected to a single CTDB node for the duration 
of their session, so there is a possibility of an imbalance in connections over 
time. Load balancing is strictly round-robin through DNS lookups, unless a more 
sophisticated load balancer is placed in front of the CTDB cluster.

There are references to CTDB + NFS / Ganesha as well but I haven’t had an 
opportunity to try it out. Most of the demand for non-native client access to 
Lustre involves Windows machines.

Malcolm.


From: lustre-discuss [mailto:lustre-discuss-boun...@lists.lustre.org] On Behalf 
Of Jeff Johnson
Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2015 5:54 AM
To: Indivar Nair
Cc: lustre-discuss
Subject: Re: [lustre-discuss] [HPDD-discuss] Lustre Server Sizing

Indivar,

Since your CIFS or NFS gateways operate as Lustre clients there can be issues 
with running multiple NFS or CIFS gateway machines frontending the same Lustre 
filesystem. As Lustre clients there are no issues in terms of file locking but 
the NFS and CIFS caching and multi-client file access mechanics don't interface 
with Lustre's file locking mechanics. Perhaps that may have changed recently 
and a developer on the list may comment on developments there. So while you 
could provide client access through multiple NFS or CIFS gateway machines there 
would not be much in the way of file locking protection. There is a way to 
configure pCIFS with CTDB and get close to what you envision with Samba. I did 
that configuration once as a proof of concept (no valuable data). It is a 
*very* complex configuration and based on the state of software when I did it I 
wouldn't say it was a production grade environment.

As I said before, my understanding may be a year out of date and someone else 
could speak to the current state of things. Hopefully that would be a better 
story.

--Jeff



On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 10:26 AM, Indivar Nair 
indivar.n...@techterra.inmailto:indivar.n...@techterra.in wrote:
Hi Scott,

The 3 - SAN Storages with 240 disks each has its own 3 NAS Headers (NAS 
Appliances).
However, even with 240 10K RPM disk and RAID50, it is only providing around 1.2 
- 1.4GB/s per NAS Header.
There is no clustered file system, and each NAS Header has its own file-system.
It uses some custom mechanism to present the 3 file systems as single name 
space.
But the directories have to be manually spread across for load-balancing.
As you can guess, this doesn't work most of the time.
Many a times, most of the compute nodes access a single NAS Header, overloading 
it.

The customer wants *at least* 9GB/s throughput from a single file-system.

But I think, if we architect the Lustre Storage correctly, with these many 
disks, we should get at least 18GB/s throughput, if not more.

Regards,

Indivar Nair


On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 10:15 PM, Scott Nolin 
scott.no...@ssec.wisc.edumailto:scott.no...@ssec.wisc.edu wrote:
An important question is what performance do they have now, and what do they 
expect if converting it to Lustre. Our more basically, what are they looking 
for in general in changing?

The performance requirements may help drive your OSS numbers for example, or 
interconnect, and all kinds of stuff.

Also I don't have a lot of experience with NFS/CIFS gateways, but that is 
perhaps it's own topic and may need some close attention.

Scott

On 7/21/2015 10:57 AM, Indivar Nair wrote:
Hi ...,

One of our customers has a 3 x 240 Disk SAN Storage Array and would like
to convert it to Lustre.

They have around 150 Workstations and around 200 Compute (Render) nodes.
The File Sizes they generally work with are -
1 to 1.5 million files (images) of 10-20MB in size.
And a few thousand files of 500-1000MB in size.

Almost 50% of the infra is on MS Windows or Apple MACs

I was thinking of the following configuration -
1 MDS
1 Failover MDS
3 OSS (failover to each other)
3 NFS+CIFS Gateway Servers
FDR Infiniband backend network (to connect the Gateways to Lustre)
Each Gateway Server will have 8 x 10GbE Frontend Network (connecting the
clients)

*Option A*
 10+10 Disk RAID60 Array with 64KB Chunk Size i.e. 1MB Stripe Width
 720 Disks / (10+10) = 36 Arrays.
 12 OSTs per OSS
 18 OSTs per OSS in case of Failover

*Option B*
 10+10+10+10 Disk RAID60

Re: [lustre-discuss] [HPDD-discuss] Lustre Server Sizing

2015-07-21 Thread Jeff Johnson
Indivar,

Since your CIFS or NFS gateways operate as Lustre clients there can be
issues with running multiple NFS or CIFS gateway machines frontending the
same Lustre filesystem. As Lustre clients there are no issues in terms of
file locking but the NFS and CIFS caching and multi-client file access
mechanics don't interface with Lustre's file locking mechanics. Perhaps
that may have changed recently and a developer on the list may comment on
developments there. So while you could provide client access through
multiple NFS or CIFS gateway machines there would not be much in the way of
file locking protection. There is a way to configure pCIFS with CTDB and
get close to what you envision with Samba. I did that configuration once as
a proof of concept (no valuable data). It is a *very* complex configuration
and based on the state of software when I did it I wouldn't say it was a
production grade environment.

As I said before, my understanding may be a year out of date and someone
else could speak to the current state of things. Hopefully that would be a
better story.

--Jeff



On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 10:26 AM, Indivar Nair indivar.n...@techterra.in
wrote:

 Hi Scott,

 The 3 - SAN Storages with 240 disks each has its own 3 NAS Headers (NAS
 Appliances).
 However, even with 240 10K RPM disk and RAID50, it is only providing
 around 1.2 - 1.4GB/s per NAS Header.

 There is no clustered file system, and each NAS Header has its own
 file-system.
 It uses some custom mechanism to present the 3 file systems as single name
 space.
 But the directories have to be manually spread across for load-balancing.
 As you can guess, this doesn't work most of the time.
 Many a times, most of the compute nodes access a single NAS Header,
 overloading it.

 The customer wants *at least* 9GB/s throughput from a single file-system.

 But I think, if we architect the Lustre Storage correctly, with these many
 disks, we should get at least 18GB/s throughput, if not more.

 Regards,


 Indivar Nair


 On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 10:15 PM, Scott Nolin scott.no...@ssec.wisc.edu
 wrote:

 An important question is what performance do they have now, and what do
 they expect if converting it to Lustre. Our more basically, what are they
 looking for in general in changing?

 The performance requirements may help drive your OSS numbers for example,
 or interconnect, and all kinds of stuff.

 Also I don't have a lot of experience with NFS/CIFS gateways, but that is
 perhaps it's own topic and may need some close attention.

 Scott

 On 7/21/2015 10:57 AM, Indivar Nair wrote:

 Hi ...,

 One of our customers has a 3 x 240 Disk SAN Storage Array and would like
 to convert it to Lustre.

 They have around 150 Workstations and around 200 Compute (Render) nodes.
 The File Sizes they generally work with are -
 1 to 1.5 million files (images) of 10-20MB in size.
 And a few thousand files of 500-1000MB in size.

 Almost 50% of the infra is on MS Windows or Apple MACs

 I was thinking of the following configuration -
 1 MDS
 1 Failover MDS
 3 OSS (failover to each other)
 3 NFS+CIFS Gateway Servers
 FDR Infiniband backend network (to connect the Gateways to Lustre)
 Each Gateway Server will have 8 x 10GbE Frontend Network (connecting the
 clients)

 *Option A*
  10+10 Disk RAID60 Array with 64KB Chunk Size i.e. 1MB Stripe Width
  720 Disks / (10+10) = 36 Arrays.
  12 OSTs per OSS
  18 OSTs per OSS in case of Failover

 *Option B*
  10+10+10+10 Disk RAID60 Array with 128KB Chunk Size i.e. 4MB Stripe
 Width
  720 Disks / (10+10+10+10) = 18 Arrays
  6 OSTs per OSS
  9 OSTs per OSS in case of Failover
  4MB RPC and I/O

 *Questions*
 1. Would it be better to let Lustre do most of the striping / file
 distribution (as in Option A) OR would it be better to let the RAID
 Controllers do it (as in Option B)

 2. Will Option B allow us to have lesser CPU/RAM than Option A?

 Regards,


 Indivar Nair



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 hpdd-disc...@lists.01.org
 https://lists.01.org/mailman/listinfo/hpdd-discuss




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 lustre-discuss mailing list
 lustre-discuss@lists.lustre.org
 http://lists.lustre.org/listinfo.cgi/lustre-discuss-lustre.org



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-- 
--
Jeff Johnson
Co-Founder
Aeon Computing

jeff.john...@aeoncomputing.com
www.aeoncomputing.com
t: 858-412-3810 x1001   f: 858-412-3845
m: 619-204-9061

4170 Morena Boulevard, Suite D - San Diego, CA 92117

High-Performance Computing / Lustre Filesystems / Scale-out Storage
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