Re: [ANNOUNCE] Lustre Lite 1.0 beta 1

[David Chow <davidchow@shaolinmicro.com>]

Peter Braam wrote:

>Features
>--------
>
>Lustre Lite 0.6:
>
>- has been tested extensively on ia32 and ia64 Linux platforms
>- supports TCP/IP and Quadrics Elan3 interconnects
>- supports multiple Object Storage Targets (OSTs) for file data storage
>- supports multiple Metadata Servers (MDSs) in an active/passive
>  failover configuration (requires shared storage between MDS nodes).
>  Automatic failover requires an external failover package such as
>  Red Hat's clumanager.
>- provides a nearly POSIX-compliant filesystem interface (some areas
>  remain non-compliant; for example, we do not synchronize atimes)
>- aims to recover from any single failure without loss of data or
>  application errors
>- scales well; we have tested with as many as 1,100 clients and 128 OSTs
>- is Free Software, released under the terms and conditions of the GNU
>  General Public License
>
>
>  
>
Quite interesting. How is it different from gfs and other cluster file 
systems? Is it a SAN/Shared-SCSI disk sharing file system or some 
cluster file system which ride on something like gnbd/nbd/iSCSI pool ? 
Not quite sensible to run cluster file systems data channels over TCP/IP 
as it is too slow, as the price of fibre-channel storage keep dropping 
as well as those for implement cluster file systems in a production 
environment are usually affordable for fibre-channel storage. The name 
"OST" seems interesting but I don't really like the iSCSI or pool of 
block devices spreading across multiple machines as it is very hard to 
manage and likely to fail easily.  How is lustre handling these senarios?

regards,
David Chow