[Beowulf] Question on hgh performance, low cost Fileserver

[ar 3107]

We are looking into designing a low cost, high performance storage system.
Requirements as below:

- Starts at 3TB, should scale up by adding more servers to say 10-12TB
- Use commodity technologies (x86_64, IB, GE, Linux), preferably all OSS
components
- Provide high I/O which scales with addition of storage nodes.
- To be used for hosting user home dirs so reliability is important
- The HPC cluster starts with 6 AMD64 nodes and is expected to scale to
1000+nodes in a year.
- Preferably without FC/SAN

We do have experience with IBM GPFS, PVFS (1,2), NetApps, PolyServe but not
with GFS and LUSTRE.

PVFS is not reliable enough for home dirs (OK for scratch), GPFS cannot do
RAID5 like striping across nodes, needs SAN for RAID1 like mirroring (cost
$$$) , polyserve is too expensive (per CPU pricing)

Is GFS or Lustre suitable for the above needs? Any other commercial slution?

I would like to know the experiences and suggestions from the advanced users
on this list.

Regards,
Arvind
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