On Oct 26, 2010, at 1:36 PM, Allen Wittenauer wrote:On Oct 26, 2010, at 11:25 AM, Hazem Mahmoud wrote:
That raises a question that I am currently looking into and would appreciate any and all advice people have.
We are replacing our current NetApp solution, which has served us well but we have outgrown it.
I am looking at either upgrading to a bigger and meaner NetApp or possibly going with Hadoop (HDFS and Fuse ).
You'd probably better looking at something like Ceph or Lustre which are meant to be fully POSIX compliant.
It's the difference between a freight train and a race car. NetApp/Lustre are race cars; Hadoop is closer to a freight train. If you're moving data to 2000 nodes.
They're two different categories. It's a mainframe versus a Linux cluster. If you can transition your mainframe to a Linux cluster, you probably shouldn't have bought a mainframe in the first place.
I need to mount the "storage solution" (HDFS or SAN) to about 5 or 6 systems. I'm a little concerned about utilizing HDFS/Fuse for a couple of reasons:
1. Performance of Fuse (how does it compare to an iSCSI SAN solution for example)...i know, it probably depends on a lot of things, but just generally-speaking or any experiences anyone has had
FUSE in general (regardless of what you're using with it) is going to be significantly slower vs. a kernel-level file system.
Slower *per node*, but you can still get impressive throughput when you multiply this to 2000 nodes.
2. Security/permissions (owner of all files show up as "nobody"
I doubt anyone has spent any time adding security the HDFS FUSE port. So even though NetApp's Kerberos stack is pretty crappy (3DES only... seriously?) , you're going to get a better security model with it.
Actually, unix permissions are there. If all files show up as "nobody", something has gone wrong in your install.
Strong security (i.e. Kerberos) is probably untested and I suspect it wouldn't work as-is.
Another question: Are there other options for mounting HDFS on these 5 or 6 systems for pure filesystem access ? (using NFS, etc)
No. I keep hoping someone builds a pNFS/NFSv4.1 server on top of Hadoop, but alas not yet.
Not yet, but again, we're pretty happy because per-process we use <10MB/s. So, FUSE is more than sufficient for our needs.
If you're just at the 5-6 node level, I would seriously think about buying a nice big RAID server from Oracle, run Solaris's nice NFS implementation, and saving some time.
I've attached our Ganglia network graphs below; the data rates really can add up.
Brian