[gpfsug-discuss] GPFS and Lustre on same node

[Sergi Moré Codina]

Hi all,

About main differences between GPFS and Lustre, here you have some bits 
from our experience:

-Reliability: GPFS its been proved to be more stable and reliable. Also 
offers more flexibility in terms of fail-over. It have no restriction in 
number of servers. As far as I know, an NSD can have as many secondary 
servers as you want (we are using 8).

-Metadata: In Lustre each file system is restricted to two servers. No 
restriction in GPFS.

-Updates: In GPFS you can update the whole storage cluster without 
stopping production, one server at a time.

-Server/Client role: As Jeremy said, in GPFS every server act as a 
client as well. Useful for administrative tasks.

-Troubleshooting: Problems with GPFS are easier to track down. Logs are 
more clear, and offers better tools than Lustre.

-Support: No problems at all with GPFS support. It is true that it could 
take time to go up within all support levels, but we always got a good 
solution. Quite different in terms of hardware. IBM support quality has 
drop a lot since about last year an a half. Really slow and tedious 
process to get replacements. Moreover, we keep receiving bad "certified 
reutilitzed parts" hardware, which slow the whole process even more.


These are the main differences I would stand out after some years of 
experience with both file systems, but do not take it as a fact.

PD: Salvatore, I would suggest you to contact Jordi Valls. He joined EBI 
a couple of months ago, and has experience working with both file 
systems here at BSC.

Best Regards,
Sergi.


On 08/08/2014 01:40 PM, Jeremy Robst wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Aug 2014, Salvatore Di Nardo wrote:
>
>> Now, skipping all this GSS rant, which have nothing to do with the file
>> system anyway  and  going back to my question:
>>
>> Could someone point the main differences between GPFS and Lustre?
>
> I'm looking at making the same decision here - to buy GPFS or to roll
> our own Lustre configuration. I'm in the process of setting up test
> systems, and so far the main difference seems to be in the that in GPFS
> each server sees the full filesystem, and so you can run other
> applications (e.g backup) on a GPFS server whereas the Luste OSS (object
> storage servers) see only a portion of the storage (the filesystem is
> striped across the OSSes), so you need a Lustre client to mount the full
> filesystem for things like backup.
>
> However I have very little practical experience of either and would also
> be interested in any comments.
>
> Thanks
>
> Jeremy
>
>
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-- 

------------------------------------------------------------------------

      Sergi More Codina
      Barcelona Supercomputing Center
      Centro Nacional de Supercomputacion
      WWW: http://www.bsc.es      Tel: +34-93-405 42 27
      e-mail: sergi.more at bsc.es   Fax: +34-93-413 77 21

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