[Beowulf] Putting /home on Lusture of GPFS

[Skylar Thompson]

On 12/24/2014 06:44 AM, Michael Di Domenico wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 6:43 PM, Christopher Samuel
> <samuel at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>> On 24/12/14 05:35, Michael Di Domenico wrote:
>>
>>> I've always shied away from gpfs/lustre on /home and favoured netapp's
>>> for one simple reason.  snapshots.  i can't tell you home many times
>>> people have "accidentally" deleted a file.
>>
>> We use GPFS snapshots for our project areas already, for just that
>> reason. :-)
> 
> Hmmm, i haven't followed GPFS all that much since probably 2005'ish,
> is snapshots in it fairly new?  I don't recall them being there way
> back then.  Perhaps a re-evaluation is in order...

They've been supported at least since v3, not sure about before though.
One caution is that deleting snapshots is very metadata-intensive, so if
you have lots of files you'll want to consider placing your metadata on
fast storage (although probably you'll want to consider it regardless of
snapshots).

Skylar