<html><body><p>Hi Aaron,<br><br>the best way to express this 'need' is to vote and leave comments in the RFE's : <br><br>this is an RFE for GNR as SW : <a href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/execute?use_case=viewRfe&CR_ID=95090">http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/execute?use_case=viewRfe&CR_ID=95090</a><br><br>everybody who wants this to be one should vote for it and leave comments on what they expect.<br><br>Sven<br><br><br><img width="16" height="16" src="cid:1__=07BB0AAEDF9ED73E8f9e8a93df938690918c07B@" border="0" alt="Inactive hide details for Aaron Knister ---09/28/2016 06:44:25 PM---Thanks Everyone for your replies! (Quick disclaimer, these "><font color="#424282">Aaron Knister ---09/28/2016 06:44:25 PM---Thanks Everyone for your replies! (Quick disclaimer, these opinions are my own, and not those of my</font><br><br><font size="2" color="#5F5F5F">From: </font><font size="2">Aaron Knister <aaron.knister@gmail.com></font><br><font size="2" color="#5F5F5F">To: </font><font size="2">gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org</font><br><font size="2" color="#5F5F5F">Date: </font><font size="2">09/28/2016 06:44 PM</font><br><font size="2" color="#5F5F5F">Subject: </font><font size="2">Re: [gpfsug-discuss] gpfs native raid</font><br><font size="2" color="#5F5F5F">Sent by: </font><font size="2">gpfsug-discuss-bounces@spectrumscale.org</font><br><hr width="100%" size="2" align="left" noshade style="color:#8091A5; "><br><br><br><tt>Thanks Everyone for your replies! (Quick disclaimer, these opinions are <br>my own, and not those of my employer or NASA).<br><br>Not knowing what's coming at the NDA session, it seems to boil down to <br>"it ain't gonna happen" because of:<br><br>- Perceived difficulty in supporting whatever creative hardware <br>solutions customers may throw at it.<br><br>I understand the support concerns, but I naively thought that assuming <br>the hardware meets a basic set of requirements (e.g. redundant sas <br>paths, x type of drives) it would be fairly supportable with GNR. The <br>DS3700 shelves are re-branded NetApp E-series shelves and pretty vanilla <br>I thought.<br><br>- IBM would like to monetize the product and compete with the likes of <br>DDN/Seagate<br><br>This is admittedly a little disappointing. GPFS as long as I've known it <br>has been largely hardware vendor agnostic. To see even a slight shift <br>towards hardware vendor lockin and certain features only being supported <br>and available on IBM hardware is concerning. It's not like the software <br>itself is free. Perhaps GNR could be a paid add-on license for non-IBM <br>hardware? Just thinking out-loud.<br><br>The big things I was looking to GNR for are:<br><br>- end-to-end checksums<br>- implementing a software RAID layer on (in my case enterprise class) JBODs<br><br>I can find a way to do the second thing, but the former I cannot. <br>Requiring IBM hardware to get end-to-end checksums is a huge red flag <br>for me. That's something Lustre will do today with ZFS on any hardware <br>ZFS will run on (and for free, I might add). I would think GNR being <br>openly available to customers would be important for GPFS to compete <br>with Lustre. Furthermore, I had opened an RFE (#84523) a while back to <br>implement checksumming of data for non-GNR environments. The RFE was <br>declined because essentially it would be too hard and it already exists <br>for GNR. Well, considering I don't have a GNR environment, and hardware <br>vendor lock in is something many sites are not interested in, that's <br>somewhat of a problem.<br><br>I really hope IBM reconsiders their stance on opening up GNR. The <br>current direction, while somewhat understandable, leaves a really bad <br>taste in my mouth and is one of the (very few, in my opinion) features <br>Lustre has over GPFS.<br><br>-Aaron<br><br><br>On 9/1/16 9:59 AM, Marc A Kaplan wrote:<br>> I've been told that it is a big leap to go from supporting GSS and ESS<br>> to allowing and supporting native raid for customers who may throw<br>> together "any" combination of hardware they might choose.<br>><br>> In particular the GNR "disk hospital" functions...<br>> </tt><tt><a href="https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSFKCN_3.5.0/com.ibm.cluster.gpfs.v3r5.gpfs200.doc/bl1adv_introdiskhospital.htm">https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSFKCN_3.5.0/com.ibm.cluster.gpfs.v3r5.gpfs200.doc/bl1adv_introdiskhospital.htm</a></tt><tt><br>> will be tricky to support on umpteen different vendor boxes -- and keep<br>> in mind, those will be from IBM competitors!<br>><br>> That said, ESS and GSS show that IBM has some good tech in this area and<br>> IBM has shown with the Spectrum Scale product (sans GNR) it can support<br>> just about any semi-reasonable hardware configuration and a good slew of<br>> OS versions and architectures... Heck I have a demo/test version of GPFS<br>> running on a 5 year old Thinkpad laptop.... And we have some GSSs in the<br>> lab... Not to mention Power hardware and mainframe System Z (think 360,<br>> 370, 290, Z)<br>><br>><br>><br>><br>> _______________________________________________<br>> gpfsug-discuss mailing list<br>> gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org<br>> </tt><tt><a href="http://gpfsug.org/mailman/listinfo/gpfsug-discuss">http://gpfsug.org/mailman/listinfo/gpfsug-discuss</a></tt><tt><br>><br>_______________________________________________<br>gpfsug-discuss mailing list<br>gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org<br></tt><tt><a href="http://gpfsug.org/mailman/listinfo/gpfsug-discuss">http://gpfsug.org/mailman/listinfo/gpfsug-discuss</a></tt><tt><br><br></tt><br><br><BR>
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