[CentOS] 40TB File System Recommendations

Thu Apr 14 01:04:49 UTC 2011
Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com>

On Apr 13, 2011, at 7:26 PM, John Jasen <jjasen at realityfailure.org> wrote:

> On 04/12/2011 08:19 PM, Christopher Chan wrote:
>> On Tuesday, April 12, 2011 10:36 PM, John Jasen wrote:
>>> On 04/12/2011 10:21 AM, Boris Epstein wrote:
>>>> On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 3:36 AM, Alain Péan
>>>> <alain.pean at lpp.polytechnique.fr
>>>> <mailto:alain.pean at lpp.polytechnique.fr>>  wrote:
>>> 
>>> <snipped: two recommendations for XFS>
>>> 
>>> I would chime in with a dis-commendation for XFS. At my previous
>>> employer, two cases involving XFS resulted in irrecoverable data
>>> corruption. These were on RAID systems running from 4 to 20 TB.
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> What were those circumstances? Crash? Power outage? What are the 
>> components of the RAID systems?
> 
> One was a hardware raid over fibre channel, which silently corrupted
> itself. System checked out fine, raid array checked out fine, xfs was
> replaced with ext3, and the system ran without issue.
> 
> Second was multiple hardware arrays over linux md raid0, also over fibre
> channel. This was not so silent corruption, as in xfs would detect it
> and lock the filesystem into read-only before it, pardon the pun, truly
> fscked itself. Happened two or three times, before we gave up, split up
> the raid, and went ext3, Again, no issues.

Every now and then I hear these XFS horror stories. They seem too impossible to believe.

Nothing breaks for absolutely no reason and failure to know where the breakage was shows that maybe there wasn't adequately skilled techinicians for the technology deployed.

XFS if run in a properly configured environment will run flawlessly.

-Ross