[Dovecot] Best Cluster Storage

[Jan-Frode Myklebust]

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