[CentOS] Parallel/Shared/Distributed Filesystems

[nate]

Geoff Galitz wrote:
>
>
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> I'm looking at using GFS for parallel access to shared storage, most likely
> an iSCSI resource.  It will most likely work just fine but I am curious if
> folks are using anything with fewer system requisites (e.g. installing and
> configuring the Cluster Suite).

Export the iSCSI resource to a box and re-export it over NFS
would be quite a bit simpler, sounds like your JPG needs are
very basic, GFS sounds overkill.

Note that iSCSI isn't very fast at all, if your array supports
fiber channel I'd highly recommend that connectivity to the
NFS servers over iSCSI any day. If your only choice is iSCSI then
I suggest looking into hardware HBAs, and certainly run jumbo
frames for the iSCSI links, use dedicated network connections for
the iSCSI network. And if you want even higher performance use
dedicated links for the NFS serving as well also with jumbo frames.

If you really want GFS then I would look into running NFS over
GFS with a high availability NFS cluster. Red Hat wrote this
useful doc on how to deploy such a system:

http://sources.redhat.com/cluster/doc/nfscookbook.pdf

My company does something similar, that is we process terrabytes
of data every day for our application, amongst a good 150 servers
or so, today we are using a 520-disk BlueArc-based NAS solution
that the company bought about 4 years ago, looking to replace it
with something else as the NAS portion will be end of lifed soon.

I absolutely would not trust any linux-based NFS or even GFS
over a well tested/supported solution myself for this kind of
requirement(most of the cost of the solution is the back end
disks anyways).

Though if the volume of data is small, and the I/O rates are
small as well you can get by just fine with a linux based
system.

If your using iSCSI your performance bottleneck will likely
be the iSCSI system itself anyways, rather than the linux
box(s).

nate