Home / server / Questions / 404781
Accepted
Amelio Vazquez-Reina
Asked: 2012-07-05 08:44:46 +0800 CST

What makes Lustre faster and more scalable than NFS?

  • 772

I have read in various places (e.g. here and here) that NFS' I/O performance does not scale, while Lustre's does, and that Lustre can deliver better I/O rates in general.

There seem to be various architectural differences between the two, but I can't identify what exactly gives Lustre the bump in speed or scalability. I guess my question is somewhat conceptual, but what is the key difference with respect to NFS, or feature, that allows Lustre to scale and deliver faster I/O rates?

nfs filesystems cluster hpc lustre

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    NFS is from 1 client to 1 server, so the overall performance is limited by the performance of that 1 server. Adding more servers does not help.

    Lustre splits the data, the data gets requested from 1 server, but can be sent from one or more other servers. So adding more servers does help (which is why "Lustre scales"). This is an important bit from your first link:

    Lustre IO performance does scale. It uses a 3rd-party transfer. Requests are made to the metadata server and IO moves directly between the affected storage component(s) and the client.

    • 5