>>> Craig Tierney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 9/13/2006 5:21 PM >>> > I really don't seem many people discussing the good and bad things > about the current crop of distributed/shared filesystems. Do > they sign a contract saying they can disclose any information about > their operation?
Well, there are a lot of metrics that goes into the selection of a file-system for a particular cluster environment. Metrics include performance(data and metadata), scalability in terms of performance and capacity, availability/redundancy, management/problem diagnostics, ease of installation/upgrade, OS/interconnect/hardware/storage device support, price per GB, support structure, backup/HSM support, and FS being open-source. File-system A might be better than File-system B on a particular metric, but the decision depends on the overall score (based on the weights assigned to each metric). Also, based on day-to-day experience with a particular file-system (after initial selection), the overall score can change in the due course of time. Cluster/Parallel file-systems interact with lot of components (client-component on compute, cluster-interconnect, server-component on I/O nodes, kernel, SAN or back-end storage device). Faults/bottlenecks on low-level components gets exposed in the file-system layer which misleads the user to thinking the file-system being flaky which is not true. Every components in the storage stack requires a careful selection process. Cheers, -Kums _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
