Over the past year or two Lustre development and releases have largely been slow and un-eventful with a fear that Oracle might kill off the product/project. Luckily that hasn't been the case, with so many large sites running Lustre, everyone just went and formed their own support groups and companies to support and develop Lustre.
This has lead to some pretty nice developments, in particular is whamcloud. I suspect whamcloud will pretty much lead the feature development and release stable enough packages for the community at large which is nice.
For the first time in a while there is a nice set of downloadable RPM's and patched kernels of Lustre which a user can download and use with little fuss. This is assuming you are using CentOS or a compatible clone. Kudos to the whamcloud crowd for putting those packages online and hopefully more packages will appear for different distros.
I really appreciate the way that whamcloud are handling the developement of the project. The following resources are really useful.
- http://wiki.whamcloud.com/
- http://downloads.whamcloud.com/ -- I've mirrored this in work for convenience.
- http://review.whamcloud.com/
I do admit that we're primarily a GPFS user in work, but there is no harm is keeping tabs on what others are using and doing. From the last time we were using Lustre, I was quite happy with the performance but it lacked some polish and documentation for the High Availability setups compared to GPFS at the time. This is probably a issue for smaller groups who don't have enough resources to maintain complex systems. Hopefully with all this new development Lustre will become a better and more sysadmin friendly (at least for the less experienced sysadmin) product over time.
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