On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 10:14:42PM -0600, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
Have you considered SGI CXFS? It's the fastest cluster FS on the planet by an order of magnitude. It uses dedicated metadata servers instead of a DLM, which is why it's so fast. Directory traversal operations would be orders of magnitude faster than what you have now.
That sounds quite impressive. Order of magnitude improvements would be very welcome. Do you have any data to back up that statement ? Are you talking streaming performance, IOPS or both ?
I've read that CXFS has bad metadata performance, and that the metadata-server can become a bottleneck.. Is the metadata-server function only possible to run on one node (with passive standby node for availability) ?
Do you know anything about the pricing of CXFS? I'm quite satisfied with GPFS, but know I might be a bit biased since I work for IBM :-) If CXFS really is that good for maildir-type storage, I probably should have another look..
-jf