CODEWITHSUNDEEP
filesystemsdistributed-computingdistributed-system
jinhwan
jinhwan

Reputation: 1227

Any distributed file system which support constant time cloning

  1. lustre, or google file system(GFS) split a file into some kinds of block, and save them to various nodes. So they can acheive scalability, distributed traffic.
  2. ZFS, btrfs, wafl support constant time cloning. By this, they can achieve cloning speed, writable snapshot, saving storage size.

I have been founding any file system which support above two feature.

Though there are a lot file system which support constant time cloning. but I can't find any distributed file system which can support constant time cloning. Lustre team look like developing lustre supporting zfs(and also support cloning). but it revealed yet(moreover it doesn't include 2.0 beta, maybe it will not be revealed in short time). Nexenta storage seemed like supporting these feature by "namespace nfs". but it wasn't. it just distribute file by file-level distribution. It means, if some file exceed size of volume of one node, it will not able to handle it. If a lot of cloned files grow to big file, they can't handle that(at least, they have to really copy(not shadowing nodes) original file to other node. maybe i can attach SAN disks to zvolume of a ZFS node. but I'm very worry about concentrated traffic of ZFS node.

so I'm looking for a file system or a solution which can handle above two issue.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 454

Answers (1)

mbuna
mbuna

Reputation: 36

One working solution is to combine the Lustre filesystem with Robinhood Policy Engine in backup mode to constantly backup your filesystem files. This mode makes it possible to backup a Lustre v2.x filesystem to an external storage. It tracks modifications in the filesystem thanks to Lustre 2+ changelogs feature (FS events), and copy modified files to the backend storage, according to admin-defined migration policies. You can configure your own upcall commands in Robinhood, for example to provide a scalable way to clone your filesystem and schedule sync tasks on several nodes.

With Lustre on ZFS, it should be possible to use ZFS snapshot feature, but even the ZFS stack is not yet ready for production (currently tested on top 1 supercomputer Sequoia at LLNL).

Upvotes: 0

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