[Lustre-devel] [wc-discuss] Re: [Twg] Lustre and cross-platform portability

[Todd, Allen <Allen.Todd@sig.com>]

On Friday, March 16, 2012 6:11 AM, Gregory Matthews wrote:
> why bother having a windows client if you lose the performance? We have
> windows based detectors and proprietary windows based analysis software
> that would definitely benefit from higher performance access to lustre
> file systems but replacing existing CIFS servers for no gain seems a bit
> pointless.

From the perspective of my firm, the benefit of a windows lustre client (native or fuse-based), even one that performs at 10% or 20% of the linux client, is the improved scalability that it offers.  Our current solution uses 4 samba gateways per hundred windows servers to achieve acceptable bandwidth, but that bandwidth can be cut to an unacceptable trickle if a large wave of native linux clients simultaneously accesses the filesystem.

We have repeatedly asked our Microsoft HPC contacts to intervene to either fund a native windows client or to get oracle to release the existing one, since scalable storage is a big hole in the Microsoft HPC toolkit.  Obviously, nothing has come out of that.  It seems Microsoft is banking on pNFS, eventually working in this space.

Allen Todd




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