Hello,
I am curious if anyone has been able to sucessfully evaluate and use
IBM's GPFS under Redhat EL 4.0?
I have read a large amount of their extensive documentation, but have
yet to find a sales channel for this software that has a Trial license
arrangement. We would like to implement GPFS on our test
infrastrucutre, and if the trial (30 day or 60 day eval) goes
sucessfully push it out to our production boxes.
1.) Has anyone used GPFS on RedHat before?
2.) Do you have a sales contact that you can connect us with that can
get us a trial?
Thanks in advance!
- Brent

Mon, 11 Sep 2006, Brent Franks wrote:

I am curious if anyone has been able to sucessfully evaluate and use
IBM's GPFS under Redhat EL 4.0?

I have read a large amount of their extensive documentation, but have
yet to find a sales channel for this software that has a Trial license
arrangement. We would like to implement GPFS on our test
infrastrucutre, and if the trial (30 day or 60 day eval) goes
sucessfully push it out to our production boxes.

1.) Has anyone used GPFS on RedHat before?

Yes.

2.) Do you have a sales contact that you can connect us with that can
get us a trial?

I think you can download the relevant packages online and use it for trial
purposes without needing a sales contact. At least that was possible for a
while (not sure if they changed their policy again), I haven't looked at
it since I switched positions.

Did you look at their download site ?

Kind regards,
-- dag wieers, dag (AT) wieers (DOT) com, http://dag.wieers.com/ --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]

9/12/06, Dag Wieers <dag (AT) wieers (DOT) comwrote:
I think you can download the relevant packages online and use it for trial
purposes without needing a sales contact. At least that was possible for a
while (not sure if they changed their policy again), I haven't looked at
it since I switched positions.

Did you look at their download site ?

Hi Dag,

Thanks for the follow up. Yes, after an extensive search we finally
found it. It was packaged under the IBM (Cluster Server Manager)
trial-ware.

we found it, it brought up other interseting questions we haven't
fully answered yet. It seems we were able to get the RPM's installed,
but all the docs point to GPFS (And CSM for that matter) are only able
to run on IBM servers.

I could understand if it was just IBM AIX or Power architecture,
however the x series would seem to imply that CSM and GPFS would run
on any Intel i386 platform.

Am I mistaken here? Is there some sort of hardware abstraction layer
that CSM or GPFS checks prior to working in production?

Thanks
- Brent

Wed, 13 Sep 2006, Brent Franks wrote:

9/12/06, Dag Wieers <dag (AT) wieers (DOT) comwrote:
I think you can download the relevant packages online and use it for trial
purposes without needing a sales contact. At least that was possible for a
while (not sure if they changed their policy again), I haven't looked at
it since I switched positions.

Did you look at their download site ?

Thanks for the follow up. Yes, after an extensive search we finally
found it. It was packaged under the IBM (Cluster Server Manager)
trial-ware.

we found it, it brought up other interseting questions we haven't
fully answered yet. It seems we were able to get the RPM's installed,
but all the docs point to GPFS (And CSM for that matter) are only able
to run on IBM servers.

IBM only supports it on IBM servers, but it should work fine on other
systems as well. Fact is that data-integrity during hardware-failure (both
SAN or server components) is very hard to verify with hardware from
different vendors. But ask your IBM representative about support on other
hardware. They might have had success stories with your combination of
hardware.

I could understand if it was just IBM AIX or Power architecture,
however the x series would seem to imply that CSM and GPFS would run
on any Intel i386 platform.

Yes, when GPFS only worked on AIX, it was easier to support the different
hardware combination. But since it has been ported to Linux, the same
limited support has been extended to their own hardware.

It is very hard to figure out what has caused data-corruption during
hardware failure in a PC world (with caching going on on different
levels) unless you control the hardware and filesystem.

Am I mistaken here? Is there some sort of hardware abstraction layer
that CSM or GPFS checks prior to working in production?

I doubt that is the case. It's a support issue. I doubt they won't provide
support for GPFS on 'alien' hardware for installation, configuration and
basic troubleshooting though.

Kind regards,
-- dag wieers, dag (AT) wieers (DOT) com, http://dag.wieers.com/ --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]

I doubt that is the case. It's a support issue. I doubt they won't provide
support for GPFS on 'alien' hardware for installation, configuration and
basic troubleshooting though.

Dag,

Thanks so much for the follow up. This is great information.

Do you (or anyone on this list) have any contact information for
someone in sales that can get us a trial of GPFS?

This trial, or even a knowledgable sales staff, has been extremely
hard to come by.

Thanks!
- Brent