Re: Storage server
On 20120909_040911, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> On 9/8/2012 2:53 PM, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
>
> > I would love to learn more about those really big XFS installations and
> > how there were made. I never dealt with more than about 4 TiB big XFS
> > setups.
>
> About the only information that's still available is at the link below,
> and it lacks configuration details. I read those long ago when this
> system was fresh. The detailed configuration info has since disappeared.
>
> http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/storage_systems.html
>
> NAS cannibalized the Columbia super quite some time ago and recycled
> some nodes into these archive systems (and other systems) after they
> installed the big Pleiades cluster and the users flocked to it. A bit
> of a shame as Columbia had 60TF capability, and for shared memory
> applications to boot. No system on earth had that capability until SGI
> released the Altix UV, albeit with half the sockets/node of the IA64
> Altix machines.
>
> The coolest part about both 512P IA64 and 256P x86-64 Altix? Debian
> will install and run with little to no modifications required, just as
> shrink wrapped SLES and RHEL run out of the box, thanks to the Linux
> Scalability Effort in the early 2000s.
>
> --
> Stan
Stan,
I've been following this thread from its beginning. My initial reading
of OP's post was to marvel at the thought that so many things/tasks
could be done with a single box in a single geek's cubicle. I resolved
to follow the thread that would surely follow closely. I think you,
Stan, did OP an enormous service with your list of questions to be
answered.
This thread drifted onto the topic of XFS. I first learned of the
existence of XFS from earlier post by you, and I have ever since been
curious about it. But I am retired, and live at home in an environment
where there is very little opportunity to make use of its features.
Perhaps you could take OP's original specification as a user wish list
and sketch a design that would fulfill the wishlist and list how XFS
would change or resolve issues that were/are troubling him.
In particular, the typical answers to questions about backup on this list
involve rsync, or packages that depend on rsync, and on having a file
system that uses inodes and supports hard links. How would an XFS design
handle "de-duplication"? Or is de-duplication simply a bad idea in very
large systems?
Sincerely,
--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@mesanetworks.net
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