[gpfsug-discuss] AFM experiences?

[Ryan Novosielski]

Ours are about 50 and 100 km from the home cluster, but it’s over 100Gb fiber.

> On Nov 23, 2020, at 4:54 PM, Andrew Beattie <abeattie at au1.ibm.com> wrote:
> 
> Rob,
> 
> Talk to Jake Carroll from the University of Queensland, he has done a number of presentations at Scale User Groups of UQ’s MeDiCI data fabric which is based on Spectrum Scale and does very aggressive use of AFM.
> 
> Their use of AFM is not only on campus, but to remote Storage clusters between 30km and 1500km away from their Home cluster. They have also tested AFM between Australia, Japan, and USA
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> > On 24 Nov 2020, at 01:20, Robert Horton <robert.horton at icr.ac.uk> wrote:
> > 
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > We're thinking about deploying AFM and would be interested in hearing
> > from anyone who has used it in anger - particularly independent writer.
> > 
> > Our scenario is we have a relatively large but slow (mainly because it
> > is stretched over two sites with a 10G link) cluster for long/medium-
> > term storage and a smaller but faster cluster for scratch storage in
> > our HPC system. What we're thinking of doing is using some/all of the
> > scratch capacity as an IW cache of some/all of the main cluster, the
> > idea to reduce the need for people to manually move data between the
> > two.
> > 
> > It seems to generally work as expected in a small test environment,
> > although we have a few concerns:
> > 
> > - Quota management on the home cluster - we need a way of ensuring
> > people don't write data to the cache which can't be accomodated on
> > home. Probably not insurmountable but needs a bit of thought...
> > 
> > - It seems inodes on the cache only get freed when they are deleted on
> > the cache cluster - not if they get deleted from the home cluster or
> > when the blocks are evicted from the cache. Does this become an issue
> > in time?
> > 
> > If anyone has done anything similar I'd be interested to hear how you
> > got on. It would be intresting to know if you created a cache fileset
> > for each home fileset or just one for the whole lot, as well as any
> > other pearls of wisdom you may have to offer.
> > 
> > Thanks!
> > Rob
> > 
> > -- 
> > Robert Horton | Research Data Storage Lead
> > The Institute of Cancer Research | 237 Fulham Road | London | SW3 6JB
> > T +44 (0)20 7153 5350 | E robert.horton at icr.ac.uk | W www.icr.ac.uk |
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> > 
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> > 
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