Lustre SFF
Introduction
Lustre SFF (Small Form Factor), is a compact deployment of ZFS-backed (Zettabyte File System) Lustre intended as an alternative to NFS for a comparable capacity and scalability.
http://lustre.ornl.gov/ecosystem-2016/documents/tutorials/Stearman-LLNL-ZFS.pdf
Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre White Paper
The Intel January 2014 white paper "Architecting a high performance storage system" serves as a good starting point for optimizing Lustre SFF.
Backend Storage
smartctl
smartctl (smartmontools; Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System) is used to uniquely identify devices, conduct device testing, and assess the health of devices.
sgpdd_survey
sgpdd_survey (sg3_utils) is used to analyze backend storage (dd is not suitable as response to multiple IO threads is of interest).
- rszlo-rszhi
- record size in KB
- Affects how many blocks can be transferred in each transaction. Simulates Lustre RPC size.
- crglo-crghi
- number of regions
- Simulates multiple Lustre clients per OST. More regions requires more seeking and hence lower performance.
- thrlo-thrhi
- number of threads
- Simulates OSS threads.
- size
- total size in MB
- blocksize
- 512 B
- Default size is 8 GB and blocksize is 512 B but 32 GB (or 2x system memory) and 1 MB blocksize recommended to simulate Lustre sequential workload.
http://wiki.lustre.org/images/4/40/Wednesday_shpc-2009-benchmarking.pdf