Coping automatically with hardware failures is feature #1 to me so I compared them all on that assumption, apologies if that wasn't clear. I couldn't quickly f

Coping automatically with hardware failures is feature #1 to me so I compared them all on that assumption, apologies if that wasn't clear. I couldn't quickly find an affirmative reference to shared storage on Lustre's so I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I'm not convinced that getting acceptable performance out of a distributed system that maintains POSIX or near-POSIX semantics is even possible in the real world; as you say it's decidedly nontrivial. The path of least pain in the real world seems to be glorified key/value blob stores i.e. MogileFS. Thanks for the writeup, I feel like I do the same round up every few years when someone suggests "so just run $LEGACYAPP on top of a distributed filesystem!" and I have to reiterate in detail why that's usually a Bad Idea.