[Lustre-discuss] Performance parameters

Wojciech Turek
Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:23:17 -0000

From my experience (production service)  NFS is better than lustre in
single server configuration.

On 11 Jun 2008, at 15:16, Enrico Morelli wrote:

> On Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:54:41 -0400
> "Brian J. Murrell" <Brian.Murrell at Sun.COM> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 2008-06-11 at 09:49 +0200, Enrico Morelli wrote:
>>>
>>> The lustre server (MDS and OSS) is an HP DL380 G5 (Dual Xeon 5130
>>> 2GHz, 2GB RAM) connected through an HP P800 Sata/SAS controller to
>>> an HP MSA60 storage equipped with 7x500GB SATA disk in RAID 6.
>>
>> So you have one single RAID6 volume that you have sliced up for the
>> MDT and OSTs?
>>
>> That configuration is going to provide a lot of contention between
>> the
>> MDT and OSTs as you have created a single "device" for
everything and
>> are losing out on the possibilities of parallelism.
>>
>> Lustre''s ability to shine depends on it''s components
having dedicated
>> access to discrete devices so that it can exploit the parallelism of
>> them.
>>
>> Lustre also shines in very scalable, high throughput situations.  It
>> is not optimized for the "lots of small files" situation.
Lots of
>> memory for caching is your best bet in the "lots of small
files" and
>> 2GB of RAM for the MDS and OSS are not very much.
>>
>> Can I ask why you chose Lustre as a solution to provide file service
>> to a single RAID6 volume of only 7 disks @ 3.5TB on a single server?
>> Lustre really is not going to shine in that configuration.
>>
>
> Because we thought that Lustre was better than NFS and more scalable
> also in a simple configuration like our.
>
> Now, if I reduce the OSTs to one do you think that I can improve the
> performance?
>
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