ZFS honesty

[Andrew Gallatin]

"Alexandre \"Sunny\" Kovalenko" writes:
 > 
 > On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 08:23 -0500, Andrew Gallatin wrote:
 > > =?UTF-8?B?6Z+T5a625qiZIEJpbGwgSGFja2Vy?= writes:
 > >  > >  OTOH that's all GPFS is.
 > >  > 
 > >  > Far more features than that - 'robust', 'fault tolerant', 'Disaster Recovery' 
 > >  > ... all the usual buzzwords.
 > >  > 
 > >  > And nothing prevents using 'cluster' tools on a single box. Not storage-wise anyway.
 > > 
 > > Having had the misfortune of being involved in a cluster which used
 > > GPFS, I can attest that GPFS is anything but "robust" and "fault
 > > tolerant" in my experience.  Granted this was a few years ago, and
 > > things may have improved, but that one horrible experience was 
 > > sufficient to make me avoid GPFS for life.
 > Would you mind sharing your experience, maybe in the private E-mail. I
 > am especially interested in the platform you have used (as in AIX or
 > Linux) and underlying storage configuration (as in directly attached vs.
 > separate file system servers).
 > 
 > I am running few small AIX clusters in the lab using GPFS 3.1 over iSCSI
 > and so far was fairly pleased with that.

Linux, with GPFS 1.x over ethernet.  If there was even the slightest
load on the ethernet network, and a GPFS heartbeat message got
lost, the entire FS would die.  That did not meet my definition of
robust :(.  Note that this was nearly 4 years ago, so it has likely
gotten better.

 > However, OP's point was that ZFS has inherent cluster abilities, of
 > which I have found no information whatsoever.

Indeed, but I do remember hearing the Lustre/ZFS rumors.

Drew