This fifth article is an editorial series that explores high performance storage and the benefits of Lustre solutions for HPC. This week we look at various attributes including how easy it is to scale Lustre file systems.
Scalability
The unique architecture of the Lustre file system has been proven to scale easily to petabytes of data that are immediately accessible to thousands of clients. The inherent scalability of Lustre aggregates storage capacity across many servers. I/O bandwidth also scales as more storage servers are added, and can be dynamically adjusted as needs change and demands for more storage capacity and bandwidth grow.
On the other hand, Lustre can also scale down efficiently to still provide high-performance parallel storage for smaller enterprise configurations.
Affordability
The Intel distribution of open source Lustre software ensures hardware neutrality and supports multi-vendor server platforms, network fabrics, and storage devices. This allows system administrators to customize their storage infrastructure as they see fit and according to individual budgets.
Offered through an annual subscription, it provides both the open source Lustre software as well as powerful administrative tools, connectors to Hadoop, Slurm (the popular Linux cluster scheduler) and full Intel storage-platform-neutral support.
Reliability
Commercial users are risk averse. Critical business data must be available at all time, recovery from device failures must be assured, and system down-time minimized. Lustre’s failover-enabled storage and redundant servers ensure high availability with no single point of failure.
Manageability
Software developed in the labs and academia have a reputation of being difficult to install and manage. And early versions of Lustre, while considered useful for business applications, were considered too difficult for an enterprise to manage.
The big advantage in this release of Lustre is the Intel Manager for Lustre software, which consolidates all file system information in an intuitive GUI browser for simplified installation, configuration, monitoring, and overall management.
Next week’s article will look at Parallel Storage . If you prefer you can download the complete guide to Lustre Solutions in a PDF from the insideHPC White Paper Library courtesy of Intel.
