On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 8:19 AM, Marc Farnum Rendino <mvg...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 5:27 PM, Eli Collins <e...@cloudera.com> wrote: > >> dfs.name.dir (where the NN >> stores its metadata) should have multiple directories on different >> disks to guard against the failure of any single disk. Many people >> also use RAIDed disks and include an NFS mount in dfs.name.dir to have >> additional, reliable copies of this data. > > > Cool; so just to make sure I understand: > > The OS presents a single directory to the NameNode; that single directory > can have other measures under it, like RAID. > > Right?
Yes, it's good to have multiple directories as well as may each or at least some of the directories reliable, eg below /data/<N>/dfs/namenode are local disks and /mnt/filer-hdfs is a reliable NFS filer. <name>dfs.name.dir</name> <value>/data/1/dfs/namenode,/data/2/dfs/namenode,/mnt/filer-hdfs/dfs/namenode</value> You also of course want to run a secondary namenode (2NN), though that's more to keep the edits log size (and restart time) manageable rather than for reliability purposes. Having a 2NN on a separate host does act as a backup of your NN metadata, though it will always be out of date. There's work on trunk to add a backup name node which gets a stream of edits from the NN so it has an update copy of the metadata. Thanks, Eli > > Thanks, > > Marc >