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| Ernest Siu 2004-12-01, 5:45 pm |
| Any know know much about the solutions from Panasas? The PanFS looks
similar to clustered filesystem like CxFS, GFS, StorNext,
Lustre...etc. except it is object-based. Their solution seems to
include the backend storage, control blades, and some NFS/CIFS heads
for interop. What is the benefit of using them versus getting Lustre
and a regular SAN? Any idea?
Regards,
Ernest
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| Faeandar 2004-12-01, 5:45 pm |
| On 1 Dec 2004 10:20:06 -0800, ernestsiu@yahoo.com (Ernest Siu) wrote:
>Any know know much about the solutions from Panasas? The PanFS looks
>similar to clustered filesystem like CxFS, GFS, StorNext,
>Lustre...etc. except it is object-based. Their solution seems to
>include the backend storage, control blades, and some NFS/CIFS heads
>for interop. What is the benefit of using them versus getting Lustre
>and a regular SAN? Any idea?
>
>Regards,
>Ernest
Well first thing is don't think about Lustre, it's a beast still and
not ready for primetime. The others you mentioned are viable but the
leaders today seem to be Polyserve, Ibrix, GPFS, and GFS. Personally
I like Polyserve personally but Ibrix and GPFS both look good as well.
PanFS is very similar to Polyserve except they do it turnkey and in a
box. The box is proprietary (not necessarily bad) but from what I
understand also fairly expensive. Otherwise I've only heard good
things about them.
I would go for something a little more open. Any of the software
solutions plus my pick of hardware. I like the options. So if I want
to use HDS disk with qlogic controllers and Dell blades, I can. Not
so with PanFS as I understand it.
But if you want something all-in-one then they are likely the best in
town right now.
~F
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| "Faeandar" <mr_castalot@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:l26sq0dbkfraja25cikhoc7qmara8mma6j@
4ax.com...
> On 1 Dec 2004 10:20:06 -0800, ernestsiu@yahoo.com (Ernest Siu) wrote:
>
Hey Guys. I run a large cluster with a lot of storage so that is my
perspective.
[vbcol=seagreen]
> Well first thing is don't think about Lustre, it's a beast still and
> not ready for primetime.
Lustre is a lot of work-there is no doubt about it. There are no
real tools (GUIs etc) to help. But they make their money in
customization I figure. What is really a good thing about Lustre
is that it is very scaleable. Most of the GFSes I have seen like
SANs and most of our boxes are NAS boxes. Lustre will let
us manage all our boxes (OSTs).
> The others you mentioned are viable but the
> leaders today seem to be Polyserve, Ibrix, GPFS, and GFS. Personally
> I like Polyserve personally but Ibrix and GPFS both look good as well.
We have a small CX500 w/ 18TB and IBM 2.5GHZ dual Opteron/QLogic
heads for testing. We will be testing IBrix (GPFS and Lustre. I am going to
install RedHat's next week if all goes well with my other work. 
IBrix has some really good features to help us manage our disks-including
a nice GUI. There are some sophisticated technical features for
fault-tolerance
and recovery you may want to look at.
> PanFS is very similar to Polyserve except they do it turnkey and in a
> box. The box is proprietary (not necessarily bad) but from what I
> understand also fairly expensive. Otherwise I've only heard good
> things about them.
We have a fair bit of experience with the Panases product. It does not
work for us and we are looking elsewhere-but they are making serious
in-roads. One of my issues is getting as much of my disk servers off NFS
as I can. With it is that I have 150TB (we just ordered another 30+) I
won't be able to get of NFS with.
Performance was really good.
> I would go for something a little more open. Any of the software
> solutions plus my pick of hardware. I like the options. So if I want
> to use HDS disk with qlogic controllers and Dell blades, I can. Not
> so with PanFS as I understand it.
Pretty much, but then if it works who cares?
>
> But if you want something all-in-one then they are likely the best in
> town right now.
I would recommend you test, test, test before plucking down $$$. Also
you may want to look at Terragrid from Terrascale. Performance is also
really good.
Anyway, that's my two cents.
--
Wolf
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| Faeandar 2004-12-02, 5:45 pm |
| On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 12:38:17 GMT, "Wolf" <wolfdotcom@hotmail.com>
wrote:
>"Faeandar" <mr_castalot@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:l26sq0dbkfraja25cikhoc7qmara8mma6j@
4ax.com...
>
>Hey Guys. I run a large cluster with a lot of storage so that is my
>perspective.
>
>
>Lustre is a lot of work-there is no doubt about it. There are no
>real tools (GUIs etc) to help. But they make their money in
>customization I figure. What is really a good thing about Lustre
>is that it is very scaleable. Most of the GFSes I have seen like
>SANs and most of our boxes are NAS boxes. Lustre will let
>us manage all our boxes (OSTs).
It's scaleable on the nodes but not on performance. You can have 1000
nodes or more but performance will begin to suffer seriously after
about 30 or 40. Read performance is scaleble, but not the write. And
my guess is most people looking at these types of solutions need write
performance as well as read.
>
>
>We have a small CX500 w/ 18TB and IBM 2.5GHZ dual Opteron/QLogic
>heads for testing. We will be testing IBrix (GPFS and Lustre. I am going to
>install RedHat's next week if all goes well with my other work.
Polyserve beat out GFS by about 30% for us. Plus it was immensely
more simple to install and configure. I have yet to get a real
low-down on GPFS but it sounds about the same as the others, not sure
what they may have that the others don't.
Ibrix is extremely attractive if you already have alot of DAS since
each one can be it's own segment server and be part of the namespace
as well. Nice re-use of existing hardware and storage, no one else
offers this in software (Acopia can take advantage of that but it's a
hw solution).
>
>
>Pretty much, but then if it works who cares?
I'm thinking in terms of expansion. Depending ont he company you may
or may not get a serious discount on enterprise grade hardware. If
you do then you'd want to take advantage of that since Panasas is
pretty expensive.
>
>
>I would recommend you test, test, test before plucking down $$$. Also
>you may want to look at Terragrid from Terrascale. Performance is also
>really good.
I'll have to look at terragrid. Heard of it but that's it.
~F
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