[Beowulf] Rackable / SGI
Tim Cutts
tjrc at sanger.ac.uk
Fri Apr 3 23:16:44 PDT 2009
On 3 Apr 2009, at 11:11 pm, Mark Hahn wrote:
>> involved with Linux, and open source things such as XFS we would not
>> have the enterprise-level features that we see now.
>
> unclear in several ways. for instance, linux has hotplug cpu
> and memory support, but I really think this is dubious, since
> there's damn little hardware that supports it, _anywhere_.
> it's more of a "bank" feature rather than merely gold-plated
> "enterprise".
We should all be able to use it in a couple of months, in the
virtualisation world. The next release of VMware infrastructure is
going to support hot adding and removal of CPUs and memory to its
virtual machines.
> XFS may have been fairly "enterprise" for its time - it's been
> available for linux for quite a while, I think. but if you look
> at options today, is it clearly the only "enterprise" choice?
> certainly not - ext3 and 4 are certainly viable, though perhaps not
> in every possible application. JFS is presumably also an example of
> big-corp contributed "enterprise" software, but I'd say has had even
> less of an effect. dare I mention advfs, which has now been open-
> sourced?
Too late, unfortunately. If HP has actually open-sourced AdvFS years
ago, when they announced the discontinuation of Tru64, things would
have been a lot better for us. But we've taken the hit now, and
copied all our data of it, so we don't care any more.
> from my position, XFS was a semi-fringe option for people who
> distrusted ext3 for some reason. (and there were a few solid ones,
> mainly just >8TB.) going forward, I expect to use ext4
> and probably btrfs; I don't see a lasting impact of XFS.
btrfs does indeed look good. I'll continue to mainly use XFS until
brfs gets here.
> if IBM did buy Sun and made an effort to get ZFS Linux-ized
> (Linus-ized), it would be interesting. especially if they also did
> so with Lustre.
Er, in what way is Lustre not already 'Linuxised'? It's a standard
part of Debian Lenny, for example.
Regards,
Tim
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