Greetings all, Does anyone have any recommendations for using ceph as a reliable, distributed backend for any existing parallel filesystems? My final goal would be to have data reliability and availability handled by ceph and the serving of a filesystem handled by .. well, a distributed, parallel filesystem ;-) To make this question clear I'll spell out a scenario that I've used and ask about how ceph can fit it. GPFS: Servers running GPFS get their blocks from raid arrays over fiber channel. The raid arrays do RAID 6. GPFS, as well, replicates the metadata to guard against loss). The GPFS servers also run samba/ctdb to serve files to clients, i.e., \\files\path refers to a variety of physical servers (via round robin dns); if a server goes down the client is seemlessly directed to another server. GPFS+ceph: Servers run the ceph client software get blocks from ceph servers (e.g., boxes with lots of disk running the osd, mon, mds, processes ...). Ceph replicates the data on the backend. GPFS doesn't replicate either data or metadata. I haven't yet tried to use this approach since the intended use to which I wish to put this storage cluster (probably) doesn't allow GPFS. I also have questions about the final performance given: ceph io server -> xfs filesystem -> osd processes -> network -> gpfs server processes exported ceph blocks, etc.... However, there are other parallel filesystems which might do, e.g., GFS, gluster, others? Am I on the right track in thinking about ceph being usable in this scenario, or is ceph really better suited to being an object store and a provider of blocks for virtual machines? Also, how will the ceph filesystem help with the above problem when it becomes available (if it will)? Thanks much for your time, JR _______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list ceph-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.ceph.com/listinfo.cgi/ceph-users-ceph.com
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