[Gllug] Combining SMB and NFS - was Embedded Linux & 1Gbps?

[John Hearns]

Nix wrote:
> On 17 Oct 2007, John Hearns spake thusly:
>> Panasas - parallel, object-based filesystem. Runs on BSD hardware, over 
>> an iSCSI transport.
> 
> A hardware-specific filesystem?! Or is this not a proper filesystem (a
> spec and/or sample implementation) but a `we sell you a box' sort of
> deal? That hardly counts in my book :/

Don't knock it till you have tried it.

The core of their product is the ActiveScale filesystem - object-based, 
parallel filesystem.

Yes, the filesystem comes with supported/certified hardware to run it 
on. In my book, as someone who has to support this stuff, thats a big 
plus. You don't get into the 'well, that motherboard has driver issues 
under XXX kernel, well that array has a faulty doo-dah, those particular 
drives have firmware which needs an update " stuff.
Panasas certify and support things end-to-end.


Let's make a comparison - would you expect to buy an enterprise storage 
array like EMC or a Pillar (etc.) and then go out and slap onto it RAID 
arrays you bought fron anywhere you fancy, just because they were cheaper?


>>                     The director blades take care of metadata serving,
>> and also act as pretty good NFS and Samba servers should you have other 
>> boxes, ie. Unix boxes or Windows PCs wishing to access the data.
> 
> i.e. it inherits all the failures of those protocols? 
They simply give you NFS and CIFS connectivity for free, as the director 
blades are already running BSD.

As the DirectFlow client is Linux only, it means that if you get a 
Panasas you can use your existing machines to feed data onto it, or to 
access results. Say use Windows based engineering workstation to 
visualize the results of a simulation.



Or does it provide
> some layer which maps the object-based data store to something
> POSIX-like? (Complete POSIX compatibility would be nice: support for
> cross-directory hardlinks and not violating the atomicity guarantees is
> a must on any modern distributed FS, I'd say.)
ActiveScale is a POSIX compliant filesystem.




>> We  have Lustre deployments on site http://www.clusterfs.com/
>> and are currently building Lustre for a big university.
>> Lustre grew out of the same project as Panasas, and has the same concept 
> 
> Did it? Lustre grew out of dissatisfaction with Coda (which grew out of
> dissatisfaction with AFS)...
Garth Gibson founded the company, and he's one of the authors of the 
original RAID paper.
I can't find a reference, but as I recall Lustre and Panasas grew out of 
requirements for the same project.
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