50Micron.com

Ok – certain people do certain things well.

I’m a storage administrator/architect.  If you present me a problem I will *ALWAYS* look at it from a storage standpoint.  If you present me with a non-storage problem, I’ll try and make it fit.

I’ve identified four types of systems engineer-type-people:

Storage people

Server people

Network people

Desktop people

I think that just about anyone in IT either fits into one of those four roles or supports one of those roles.

Now when you are looking to solve a problem, the solution you get depends on who you go to.  If you ask a desktop person to solve a network problem for instance, they will probably come up with something under the desk.  (IE throwing a linksys router under a desk.)

If you try and throw a server person a storage role, you’re going to get a server solution to that role.

Enter IBM GPFS.

GPFS is a server solution to a storage problem.  It’s obvious that the person who came up with the idea of solving a storage problem by loading software on a server is not a storage person.

POSIT:  Mutliple hosts in a web-farm need access to data.  Filesystems need to be R/W to an ingest server and R/O to the web-content servers.

Storage Solution:  NAS/NFS – Trunked connection to a real backbone and multiple Apache webserver front-ends running at 1G to play out data.  (Fastest data transfer is going to be the 45MB/Sec backbone coming into the building, so a single Gigabit connection can handle it.   F5 Round-robin load-balancer to distribute the front-end load.  (might also be proposed by Savvy network people, who tend to understand NAS)

Server Solution:  IBM GPFS solution.  Over a million dollars in net-new server hardware + software licensing (not including storage).   Each host accessing storage requires HBA’s, Drivers, fast RELIABLE network. and a level of complexity unheard of even in government.

From what I can tell, and maybe someone can give me a little more insight, works very much like Sun’s Shared QFS.  A metadata server acts as a gatekeeper telling which member servers can access which blocks on which disks.  There is still no simultaneous disk access because a SCSI lock is a SCSI lock.

Now from a storage standpoint, this is rife with problems.

First off, it would seem that if network access was compromised during a write data integrity could easily be compromised.

Secondly, Other than block-level mirroring of the underlying disks, I can’t see a good way to replicate this.  And block-level mirroring of the underlying disks would require an identical infrastructure at the remote/DR site wouldn’t it?  That is of course assuming that the metadata can be mirrored.

Now in database uses or other types of distributed computing I can see it being VERY valuable.  But for flat file storage and web retrieval I can’t think of a single good reason to use something so obnoxiously complicated.  Especially when EMC Celerra, NetApp, or just about any of the other higher-end NAS appliances would cost *SO MUCH* less and be *SO MUCH* more reliable.

/EndOfRant

I just got the following job posting and it made me, literally, laugh out loud, spitting latte all over my laptop.

If your sales rep allows you to do something like this, it’s a fair bet that s/he hates you (or is planning to buy your company out of bankruptcy later).

“WANTED: VMWare 1-month resident to assist with new deployment/planning around 200VM’s and new Celerra NS480′s being purchased by client. Will probably end up primarily being VM’s using NFS on NS Celerra Replication will be enabled between (2) NS480′s.”

The key points are:

200VM’s

Celerra

**NFS**

Replicator

Ewww…..

Did I mention NFS?

Someone actually sold this?  Even if the customer comes to you direct and says “this is what I want…” the answer should be “In the interests of protecting you from yourself, I can’t allow you to do this.”

I don’t care how much the deal is worth.