[Beowulf] Sun buys Lustre

[Peter St. John]

For those of us who are behind on filesystem terminology, I found "OST" =
"Objective Storage Target" at
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/UserInfo/Resources/Hardware/News/tungsten/ByDate/Lustre_Striping.html
Peter ("a TLA without a Wiki entry is Obscure")


On 9/12/07, Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
>
> > I'm not sure if everyone has seen this yet, but Sun just bought Cluster
> > File System (Lustre):
>
> wow, that's a bit of a shock.  I had heard mutterings about CFS using ZFS,
> but would not have guessed a buyout.  where does that leave HP, for
> instance?  or even SGI, who seem to now be promoting Lustre for their
> new blade clusters...
>
> the combination of ZFS and Luster is a bit strange to contemplate:
>
>        - Lustre's main thing is to set up client-OST parallel streams
>        and then get out of the way.  it uses a single metadata server,
>        which can be a bottleneck for non-giant-stream workloads, and
>        which currently stores per-file ost-mapping info via EAs in an
>        ext3 FS.  OST'S don't need much functionality in their local FS,
>        and use ext3 (with extents) as well.
>
>        - ZFS's main thing is managing storage pools directly so as to
>        provide intelligent file-level redundancy.  and it has comfortingly
>        high size limits and some nice integrity features.  but afaik,
>        no provisions at all for clustering or parallel access.
>
> I guess you could broadly compare CFS's OST's to ZFS's storage pools
> (sorry, don't know the ZFS terminology).  but "clusterizing" the metadata
> logic of ZFS (parallelizing it and presumably distributing it across
> clients)
> sounds kind of tricky.
>
> (I confess my only experience is with HP's SFS version of Luster, and none
> at all with ZFS.)
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