[wplug] Re: NFS Availability Issues -- why I should just help off-list ...

[Jonathan Billings]

Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> I will repeat ... Can I shoot myself now?!  ;)

Go right ahead.  Shooting yourself in the foot is a well-established 
side-effect in the IT industry!

To be honest, I've been following this thread with interest, because I 
run several high performance clusters, all of which share home and 
scratch disks through NFS.

We actually have a couple cluster file systems we use too - PVFS2 
(http://www.pvfs.org), IBM's GPFS 
(http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/clusters/software/gpfs.html) and I've 
been looking at Lustre (http://www.lustre.org) and when it finally 
exists, pNFS.

Sadly, none of the open source cluster file systems we're using has very 
good failover.  In fact, the most reliable remains to be the NFS 
volumes.  Most of them are optimized for lots of storage, fast read or 
writes, for cheap.

It seems that the best way to keep the NFS volume available is to focus 
more on the underlying hardware than adapting the protocol.  For 
example, using RAID, redundant power supplies, and effective monitoring.

Maybe I'm just missing something.

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>