Lustre/Intermezzo/P2P [LWN.net]

Lustre/Intermezzo/P2P

Posted Dec 18, 2003 14:23 UTC (Thu) by brugolsky (✭ supporter ✭, #28)
Parent article: Lustre 1.0 released

Lustre is perhaps a bit too tightly coupled for home, and especially mobile wireless use. Additionally, it is designed for configurations where there is a clear distinction between clients and servers.

The typical home network consists of a bunch of machines with an OS install that is an every-shrinking fraction of the available disk-space. It is not uncommon for a home with a few machines to have a few tens to hundreds of gigabytes of disk space scattered across several machines. It would be nice to unify that under one namespace.

Laptop/PDA users want the aggressive caching and disconnection/reintegration of Intermezzo, but in a more distributed P2P fashion, with replication. Something like Ivy (http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/ivy/) is a bit closer to meeting those needs.

Happily, Peter Braam and Andreas Dilger have suggested that once Lustre has met all of its requirements, they are inclined to revisit Intermezzo and apply some of the lessons learned in constructing Lustre.

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Lustre/Intermezzo/P2P

Posted Dec 19, 2003 17:12 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

It is not uncommon for a home with a few machines to have a few tens to hundreds of gigabytes of disk space scattered across several machines. It would be nice to unify that under one namespace.

Agreed, but that has little to do with Lustre. You're alluding to a distributed filesystem, which is fundamentally different from what Lustre is: a shared filesystem. The Lustre approach to unifying the storage is to remove the storage from all those systems and stick it into a central filesystem to which all the systems have access. It's specially designed to have that logically centralized system be physically spread out enough that it isn't a bottleneck even for huge numbers of storage users.

The separate storage approach is what makes Lustre impractical for small applications -- who wants to pay for a bunch of dedicated metadata and object storage servers just to serve a few home computers?

I don't doubt that features could theoretically be added to Lustre to allow it be a distributed filesystem and/or be practical in homes and mobile situations, but those features would have little to do with Lustre technology as it is known today.