Attended: ldpaniak (project manager), a2brenna, cscflab, rblander, jjohnson

Objectives:

• Decide on general architecture of service connections to DFS and external clients.
• Decide on details of DFS configuration, software and hardware.

Already under work:

• high-speed dedicated storage network (Devon/Dan/Lori)

To be determined:

• Expected typical/max load of FileShare/OwnCloud gateway in production - how much hardware do we need for active/passive configuration? Containers OK?

General Discussion:

• Review of motivation for SCS OwnCloud/DFS with Math reps.
• Motivation to give options to replace NetApp in the future seen as valid.
• Math has functional, restricted usage OwnCloud system in operation. Looking to expand it in the near future.
• It appears OwnCloud has option of internal encryption of data so only encrypted bits get to backing storage (DFS).
• Warning on problems with disparate data formats on backing storage (UTF-8, C.UTF-8...). Leaving these details to dedicated service providers independent of DFS seen as a positive.
• Importance of real-time, actionable load monitoring, notifications, predictive failure warnings stressed.
• General importance of systems in warranty during production agreed.
• M3 and MC buildings are on same campus power grid. Questions for HA of DFS and services.

Filesystem details:

• Only considering Ceph and gluster going forward.
• Each of Ceph and gluster provide block devices to network clients. Ceph via RBD, gluster via libgfapi or as an iSCSI target using LIO
• Ceph has OSD addition and removal. Need to investigate brick addition and removal for arbiter volumes in gluster.

Decisions:

• All end-user services will be mediated by systems/containers/VMs attached to the DFS 40GbE ring network. No direct end-user access to DFS products will be provided.
• Mediating services decouples service upgrades, maintenance, security and configuration from DFS core functionality. This modularity will be invaluable as the number and type of services using DFS products increases.
• Mediating services allows for per-service level of data encryption and isolation.

Next meeting: 2016-06-09 13:00

Deliverables:

• cscflab (Nathan Fish): Investigate options for multi-server (parallel) NFS system that utilizes DFS products (block, glusterfs, cephFS, etc) to provide Kerberized NFS to Math/CS client systems.

• a2brenna: Build latest Ceph system on 16.04 with three nodes. Demonstrate cluster configuration at command line including features (eg. add/remove OSD etc.)

• ldpaniak: Build gluster cluster for demo of addition/remove of bricks(~OSD). Use gluster 3.8(?)

jjohnson recommends attendance of Hari Chotara (hchotara@uwaterloo.ca) who has been working on DFS options for Math.

-- LoriPaniak - 2016-06-05