Lustre discuss - Dec 2007 - Using Lustre as a storage backend for non-Lustre clients?

Hi folks,

Just spit balling some ideas in the lab here ... has anyone ever
experimented with using Lustre as a storage backend for multiple
conventional NAS protocols? i.e. configure a nominal Lustre environment, and
configure each Lustre client as a Samba and/or NFS server?

Basically ... would Lustre be suited to front clustered storage for a number
of clients that are otherwise incapable of running the Lustre software
itself?

If anyone''s done something like this before, what kind of performance
numbers did you see under nominal operating conditions?

thanks,
Klaus

On Dec 12, 2007  12:48 -0800, Klaus Steden wrote:
> Just spit balling some ideas in the lab here ... has anyone ever
> experimented with using Lustre as a storage backend for multiple
> conventional NAS protocols? i.e. configure a nominal Lustre environment,
and
> configure each Lustre client as a Samba and/or NFS server?
Yes, it is possible to re-export Lustre with Samba and NFS.
> If anyone''s done something like this before, what kind of
performance
> numbers did you see under nominal operating conditions?
The performance isn''t as good as with Lustre, but we are working to
improve it.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.

Hello!

On Dec 13, 2007, at 7:13 AM, Andreas Dilger wrote:
>> If anyone''s done something like this before, what kind of
performance
>> numbers did you see under nominal operating conditions?
> The performance isn''t as good as with Lustre, but we are working
to
> improve it.
Actually recent measurements in bug 13371 show that we can achieve  
around 92 Mb/sec
streaming I/O on gigabit connectivity (i.e. nfs server/lustre client  
has gigabit
connections in both directions) with right patches (that are making  
their way to our
codebase). I hope this ratio holds up to higher speeds too.

Bye,
     Oleg