[Beowulf] distributed file storage solution?

[Andrew Shewmaker]

On 12/11/06, Brian D. Ropers-Huilman <brian.ropers.huilman at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/11/06, Craig Tierney <ctierney at hypermall.net> wrote:
> > Lustre supports redundant meta-data servers (MDS) and failover for the
> > object-storage servers (OSS).  However, "high-performing" is relative.
> > Great at streaming data, not at meta-data.
>
> Which is really the bane of all cluster file systems, isn't it? Meta
> data accesses kill performance.

Ceph is a new distributed file system with an interesting way of handling
metadata.

"Ceph maximizes the separation between data and metadata management by
replacing allocation tables with a pseudo-random data distribution
function (CRUSH) designed for heterogeneous and dynamic clusters of
unreliable object storage devices (OSDs)."

They've got a prototype and quite a few research papers on their site.

http://ceph.sourceforge.net

-- 
Andrew Shewmaker