Lustre File System Getting New Community Distro 68
darthcamaro writes "Oracle acquired a lot of open source tech from Sun that has since been forked — or is in the process of being forked. The open source Lustre high performance computing file system isn't on the list of forked projects, but it is getting a new, community-driven distro that is trying really hard to say that they're not officially a fork. 'Since April of 2010 there has been confusion in the community, and we've seen an impact in the business confidence in Lustre,' Brent Gorda, CEO and president of Whamcloud told InternetNews.com. 'The community has been asking for leadership, the commitment of a for-profit entity that they can rely on for support and a path forward for the technology.'"
Re:What is Lustre File System (Score:5, Interesting)
At a functional level, Lustre (GPL) is to ZFS (CDDL) as CXFS (commercial) is to XFS (GPL) for SGI. They are the upper 'cluster' layer to take advantage of the underlying filesystems' capability. I believe this approach is divergent from that of GFS, due to the upper/lower approach, but I'm not that familiar with clustered filesystems.
However: Arguably, Lustre on ZFS is a mumuchch better option due to ZFSs inherent capability superiorty over XFS. I've liked XFS historically, but ZFS is so drastically superior than anything else out there (in terms of storage management and available capacity and throughput) - all 'out of the box' that it's a no-brainer to use zvols for things other than direct zfs posix access. (For instance, they make great VM iSCSI targets, or local raw disks for VMs, or..)
Side note: the linux zfsonlinux.org port is being successfully used as the base volume manager for Lustre right now, so it is apparently quite capable/stable at that level. (zfsonlinux does not yet have zfs posix support.) Lustre on ZFS It, apparently, scales much better than the traditional LVM/RAID/etc. backend methods.
Very first thing to do is... (Score:4, Interesting)
Lose every tie to ZFS. Every. Single. One.
Right now.
Like every piece of software Oracle is involved in, ZFS is a big fat patent trap. Not only that, but ZFS is a lot slower than Ext3 and Ext4, and probably Btrfs[1] as well. There is absolutely no benefit to using ZFS as an object storage target, there is only the certainty of legal problems.
[1] Oracle is involved with Btrfs too, so exercise due caution.