[gpfsug-discuss] Spectrum Scale licensing

[Jonathan Buzzard]

On 16/04/2020 04:26, Flanders, Dean wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> As IBM has completely switched to capacity based licensing in order to 
> use SS v5 I was wondering how others are dealing with this? We do not 
> find the capacity based licensing sustainable. Our long term plan is to 
> migrate away from SS v5 to Lustre, and based on the Lustre roadmap we 
> have seen it should have the features we need within the next ~1 year 
> (we are fortunate to have good contacts).

The problem is the features of Lustre that are missing in GPFS :-)

For example have they removed the Lustre feature where roughly 
biannually the metadata server kernel panics introducing incorrectable 
corruption into the file system that will within six months cause 
constant crashes of the metadata node to the point where the file system 
is unusable?

In best slashdot car analogy GPFS is like driving round in a Aston 
Martin DB9, where Lustre is like having a Ford Pinto. You will never be 
happy with Pinto in my experience having gone from the DB9 to the Pinto 
and back to the DB9.

That said if you use Lustre as a high performance scratch file system 
fro HPC and every ~6 months do a shutdown and upgrade, and at the same 
time reformat your Lustre file system you will be fine.

Our experience with Lustre was so bad we specifically excluded it as an 
option for our current HPC system when it went out to tender.


JAB.

-- 
Jonathan A. Buzzard                         Tel: +44141-5483420
HPC System Administrator, ARCHIE-WeSt.
University of Strathclyde, John Anderson Building, Glasgow. G4 0NG