[CentOS] Parallel/Shared/Distributed Filesystems

[Geoff Galitz]

Geoff Galitz
Blankenheim NRW, Deutschland
http://www.galitz.org


-----Original Message-----
From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf
Of nate
Sent: Montag, 10. November 2008 16:32
To: centos at centos.org
Subject: Re: [CentOS] Parallel/Shared/Distributed Filesystems

>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:


The main issue is that we feel that our current solution (Linux NFS Clients
-> NetApp) is not sufficient.  Our team comes from a Solaris background (my
colleague) and an HPC background (me) and are worried about running into
scalability issues as our infrastructure grows and the internal network
becomes busier and busier.  We've already been wrestling with issues such as
broken mountpoints, stale mounts and unrecoverable hangs.  Fortunately those
issues have all been resolved for now, but as we continue to grow we may see
them recur.  Consider all that as background.

The NetApp is running out of space and we prefer to not replace it with
another one, if possible.  To that end we are exploring our options.

I played around with iSCSI, Multipath and NFS and have found that works
quite well so far.  Queuing data for delivery when a node become unavailable
using multipath would be sufficient for our needs.  Our internal monitoring
systems can take action if a server becomes unavailable and the data can be
queued up long enough for any recovery actions to complete (apart from the
next big earthquake).  We do not necessarily require a more traditionak
redundant storage system (such as an NFS cluster with dedicated NFS server
nodes)... but we are not ruling that out, either.


Just all food for thought.

-geoff