Hi I wanted to propose IBM's Global Parallel File System™ (GPFS™ ) as the distributed filesystem. GPFS™ is well known for its unmatched scalability and leadership in file system performance, and it is now IBM’s premier storage virtualization solution. More information at http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/clusters/software/gpfs/ GPFS™ is POSIX compliant and designed for general workloads. The filesystem performance is designed for random access behavior on I/O operations
We at IBM have been running Hadoop on GPFS™ and have seen comparable performance number to HDFS. We are in the process of putting the GPFS plugin into Hadoop code. In which case you will also be able to run Map-Reduce jobs natively on GPFS™ along with other applications on the same cluster." The following papers talk about the performance comparison between HDFS and GPFS™ and changes made to GPFS™ to support map reduce data loads. Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, Karan Gupta, Prashant Pandey, Himabindu Pucha, Prasenjit Sarkar, Mansi Shah, Renu Tewari: Cloud analytics: Do we really need to reinvent the storage stack? in Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud '09) June 15, San Diego, CA Guanying Wang, Ali R. Butt (Virgiana Tech), Prashant Pandey, Karan Gupta (IBM Almaden): Using Realistic Simulation for Performance Analysis of MapReduce Setups in Workshop on Large-Scale System and Application Performance (LSAP) June 10, 2009 Munich Guanying Wang, Ali R. Butt, Prashant Pandey and Karan Gupta. A Simulation Approach to Evaluating Design Decisions in MapReduce Setup in IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Modelling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems 2009 --Reshu ----- Forwarded by David Fallside/Santa Teresa/IBM on 11/13/2009 04:12 PM ----- "Dmitry Pushkarev" <u...@stanford.ed To u> <common-user@hadoop.apache.org> cc 11/13/2009 01:56 PM Subject Alternative distributed filesystem. Please respond to common-u...@hadoo p.apache.org Dear Hadoop users, One of our hadoop clusters is being converted to SGE to run very specific application and we're thinking about how to utilize these huge hard-drives that are there. Since there will be no hadoop installed on these nodes we're looking for alternative distributed filesystem that will have decent concurrent read/write performance (compared to HDFS) for large amounts of data. Using single filestorage - like NAS RAID arrays proved to be very ineffective when someone is pushing gigabytes of data on them. What other systems can we look at? We would like that FS to be mounted on every node, open source, hopefully we'd like to have POSIX compliance and decent random access performance (yet it isn't critical). HDFS doesn't fit the bill because mounting it via fuse_dfs and using without any mapred jobs (i.e. data will typically be pushed from 1-2 nodes at most at different times) seems slightly "ass-backward" to say the least. Thanks.