Using NetApp with iRODS

[Emyr James]

Dear all,

We have inherited 2 Netapp systems and we have set them up using the OnTap OS. We can currently mount these using NFS. They are identical systems taking up a full rack. One rack is at our primary site and we have another identical rack set up at a secondary data centre about 10km away. There is transparent networking between the 2 sites so there is no issue with accessing either NetApp from either location. Both NetApps have 8 10Gbps links.

The plan was to use this as storage for an iRODS system and to have iRODS handle replicating data from the primary to the secondary.

One issue I'm trying to work out is how exactly to make this storage available to iRODS. One way I can think of would be to create 8 NFS shares on each Netapp, each of around 100TB, then install 16 servers (8 at each location) each with a 10gbps link and mount one of those shares on each server. We'd then have to potentially create extra replicas in the primary to handle the situation where a server goes down.

I think there may be other ways of doing this using composable resources somehow. Is there any way to avoid having to shard up the netapp storage allowing multiple servers to mount this single nfs mount (well one big mount at each location) and using composable resources and business rules to ensure consistency?

Does anyone have a similar setup with regards to storage?

Many thanks,

Emyr James

Head of IT

Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG)
C/ Dr. Aiguader, 88
PRBB Building
08003 Barcelona, Spain
Tel. +34 93 316 01 00
Fax +34 93 316 00 99

[Terrell Russell]

Hi Emyr,

Nice to talk with you earlier today.

For posterity, I'll attempt to answer here what we discussed.

Today, the best answer will be to carve the NetApp storage and provide a separate vault for 16 separate unixfilesystem resources on 16 separate machines (8 on servers with NFS mounts to one NetApp, and 8 on servers with NFS mounts to the other NetApp).

Perhaps configured like this...

rootResc:passthru
└── replResc:replication
    ├── randomA:random
    │   ├── netappA001:unixfilesystem
    │   ├── netappA002:unixfilesystem
    │   ├── netappA003:unixfilesystem
    │   ├── netappA004:unixfilesystem
    │   ├── netappA005:unixfilesystem
    │   ├── netappA006:unixfilesystem
    │   ├── netappA007:unixfilesystem
    │   └── netappA008:unixfilesystem
    └── randomB:random
        ├── netappB001:unixfilesystem
        ├── netappB002:unixfilesystem
        ├── netappB003:unixfilesystem
        ├── netappB004:unixfilesystem
        ├── netappB005:unixfilesystem
        ├── netappB006:unixfilesystem
        ├── netappB007:unixfilesystem
        └── netappB008:unixfilesystem

This will get you full access to the 16 10Gbps links.

Sometime in the future, the better answer might be to employ the 'detached' mode of the unixfilesystem plugin (this is not yet implemented/available).  It would look similar to the 'cacheless_detached' functionality currently available in the S3 resource plugin (https://github.com/irods/irods_resource_plugin_s3).

This HOST_MODE would allow you to share a single NFS mount point for your multiple machines (each still with independent networking to the NetApp) but without carving up the NetApp storage (perhaps at all).

Adding the detached mode functionality to the unixfilesystem is this issue:

  https://github.com/irods/irods/issues/4421

Thanks,

Terrell

--
--
The Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) - https://irods.org
 
iROD-Chat: http://groups.google.com/group/iROD-Chat
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "iRODS-Chat" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to irod-chat+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/irod-chat/3c5d385b-a82f-436e-9aca-7d103084bc3dn%40googlegroups.com.