Joachim Schipper wrote:
there is nothing wrong with serving directly from NFS.
Really? You have a lot more experience in this area, so I will defer to
you if you are sure, but it seems to me that in the sort of system I
explicitly assumed (something like a web farm), serving everything off
NFS would involve either very expensive hardware or be rather slow.
I see how in your example - a lot of storage, not accessed often - just
serving everything off NFS makes perfect sense. However, that was not
what I was talking about.
at HPC facilities (LANL, sandia, LLNL, argonne, etc) NFS is used
extensively for this purpose since the amount of storage required for
simulation outputs greatly outstrips the storage that any one machine
can provide, especially the compute nodes. before i switched my email
address i would get regular notifications that NFS filesystems were down
for this-or-that many hours at compute facility X. from my observations
redundancy is the biggest problem with NFS and that its ability to
efficiently serve up data is more than ample.
AFS provides additional redundancy via volume replication and having the
various services that comprise it spread over several machines. there is
a lot of documentation to go through tho.
cheers,
jake
Perhaps you could elaborate a little? I'm interested, at least...
Joachim
