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

[John Hearns]

Matthew King wrote:
> 
> 
> On which note - is anyone aware of anything which is better than NFS,
> for varying values of 'better'?

You called?
Panasas - parallel, object-based filesystem. Runs on BSD hardware, over 
an iSCSI transport. 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.
Each storage blade is an iSCSI target, and has two drives in a software 
RAID stripe. Scales like crazy, and adding new capacity is as simple as 
adding in new storage blades, which are automatically recognised and 
installed. Distributed sparing, ie unlike a RAID array an individual 
blade (blades) are not left as hot spares - you have a 'high water mark' 
and leave space to reconstruct if a blade fails. Demand led 
reconstruction - ie. the files which are being asked for are at the 
front of the queue.
Failover clustering of three or more director blades if you have them.
Files are held on the filesystem as either mirrored (small files) or a 
RAID 5 (that's on a per-file basis). Rock-solid cache coherency.
We have Lustre installations on several sites, and I'm a Panasas 
certified engineer.


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 
of metadata server(s) and Object Storage Targets.
Our Lustre build includes Linux-HA type failover of the metadata server
(pull the plug, it keeps on going).




BTW, Real Men (TM) talk Parallel NFS these days, and would not know what 
to do with a plate of quiche.
http://www.pnfs.com/



ps. Could get someone from Panasas to do a technical talk at a GLLUG if 
there is interest.




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