[Beowulf] Lustre Upgrades

[John Hearns]

Paul, thanks for the reply.
I would like to ask, if I may. I rather like Glustre, but have not deployed
it in HPC. I have heard a few people comment about Gluster not working well
in HPC. Would you be willing to be more specific?

One research site I talked to did the classic 'converged infrastructure'
idea of attaching storage drives to their compute nodes and distributing
Glustre storage. They were not happy with that IW as told, and I can very
much understand why. But Gluster on dedicated servers I would be interested
to hear about.


On Tue, 24 Jul 2018 at 16:41, Paul Edmon <pedmon at cfa.harvard.edu> wrote:

> While I agree with you in principle, one also has to deal with the reality
> as you find yourself in.  In our case we have more experience with Lustre
> than Ceph in an HPC and we got burned pretty badly by Gluster.  While I
> like Ceph in principle I haven't seen it do what Lustre can do in a HPC
> setting over IB.  Now it may be able to do that, which is great.  However
> then you have to get your system set up to do that and prove that it can.
> After all users have a funny way of breaking things that work amazingly
> well in controlled test environs, especially when you have no control how
> they will actually use the system (as in a research environment).
> Certainly we are working on exploring this option too as it would be
> awesome and save many headaches.
>
> Anyways no worries about you being a smartarse, it is a valid point.  One
> just needs to consider the realities on the ground in ones own environment.
>
> -Paul Edmon-
>
> On 07/24/2018 10:31 AM, John Hearns via Beowulf wrote:
>
> Forgive me for saying this, but the philosophy for software defined
> storage such as CEPH and Gluster is that forklift style upgrades should not
> be necessary.
> When a storage server is to be retired the data is copied onto the new
> server then the old one taken out of service. Well, copied is not the
> correct word, as there are erasure-coded copies of the data. Rebalanced is
> probaby a better word.
>
> Sorry if I am seeming to be a smartarse. I have gone through the pain of
> forklift style upgrades in the past when storage arrays reach End of Life.
> I just really like the Software Defined Storage mantra - no component
> should be a point of failure.
>
>
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