[ogfs-users]OpenGFS viability

[Brian <signal@shreve.net>]

I am wanting to use OpenGFS for a live production mail server setup.  I 
wanted to post here to find out just how "ready" you
all feel opengfs is to be used for something important like this.

I work for an ISP, and we have built a set of 4 mailservers (running 
qmail with maildir) that are backended by a single
fileserver.  Originally we were considering NFS to share the mail store 
over to the servers.  Then we started looking
at gnbd/iSCSI, which naturally brought me to what I felt was the best 
situation, fibre channel.  The qlogic 2200 cards
are cheap and readily available, and so are the switches.

I was disappointed to find out that Qlogic has no target support in 
there drivers right now for Linux.  I was glad
to see that the feral Qlogic driver is included in the big opengfs 
patch, so that it is my understanding I will gain
target support with this patch.

Looking back, had I known I would have ended up with Fibre channel, i 
would have just purchased a raid box
with some embedded OS on it, and not used an actual server (Redhat AS 
2.1) which is basically going to be
doing nothing more than running the target driver.

Should I be using the latest stable/release version (the one that was 
just released)?  How safe is this code?
I am mostly concerned about catastrophic failure or unrecoverable 
filesystem corruption.

It wont be a very loaded system.  Each of the 3 mail servers is 
configured as:

Intel SE7501BR2 motherboard
Dual Xeon 2.4ghz
RocketDrive ram drive (for mail queue)
3ware IDE RAID controller (raid 1)
1gb memory
qlogic 2200 card
Redhat 8.0

all are frontended by a Foundry Fastiron layer4 switch to do server 
load balancing.

On the backend is a single fileserver:

Intel SE7501BR2 motherboard
Dual Xeon 2.4ghz
2 3ware IDE RAID Controllers (various raids and levels)
1gb memory
qlogic 2200
Redhat AS 2.1

There are about 15000 mailboxes currently, so the hardware/design is 
really a lightly loaded system.

I feel this is a very good application for OpenGFS since it offers alot 
of the benefits of NFS, without the negatives (poor locking support, IP 
overhead, stale file handles, SLOW).

Brian



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