Comparing the Performance,
Reliability and Administration
Requirements of Different
Parallel File Systems
COMPETITIVE COMPARISONCOMPETITIVE COMPARISON

Comparing the Performance,
Reliability and Administration Requirementsof Different Parallel File Systems
Comparing commercially available solutions that integrate parallel file systems can be challenging. Every user’s
application mix and use-cases are different and specific actual targeted benchmarking would be required to see
how each system would perform against an organization’s specific workload. However, there are some straightforward ways to compare parallel file systems that will give you a very good sense of whether or not the systemmeets your expectations for an effective HPC storage deployment.
The comparison below evaluates the BeeGFS, GPFS, Lustre and Panasas® parallel file systems on the basis ofperformance, reliability, administration requirements and support. We looked at throughput per hard disk drive(HDD) as a comparable figure of merit, since the number of disks has the primary impact on the system footprint, compared read/write performance, data availability, tiering, tuning requirements, uptime, rebuild times,
and what it takes to run and support the system.
The PanFS® parallel file system stands out for being 2X faster than BeeGFS, GPFS and Lustre, without any of
their notorious complexity and brittleness. With PanFS, performance and capacity scale linearly without limitation, and performance adapts to dynamically changing workloads and is consistently fast, regardless of workload
complexity. In addition, PanFS delivered on the ActiveStor® appliance combines the industry’s leading priceperformance with easy manageability at the lowest total cost of ownership of any HPC storage solution. HPCorganizations no longer need to trade off performance and price-performance for simplicity, uptime and great
support. With PanFS on ActiveStor Ultra, HPC organizations can have it all.

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COMPETITIVE COMPARISON

Performance
Features

PanFS onPanasas
ActiveStorUltra

LustreDDN
Exascaler

BeeGFS

IBMESSGPFS

Notes

2 PB systemestimatedperformance

20 GB/S

10.4 GB/S

9.4 GB/s

8.9 GB/S

All assuming approx. 120 drives
at 16 TB each, DDN Lustre,
BeeGFS and GPFS would
need to use 2X more drives toachieve similar performancecompared to Panasas.

Read/write
performance
ratio (approx.)

1 to 1

1 to 12 to 1

2 to 1

BeeGFS writes half speed ofreads with Buddy Mirroring.

Performanceloss as systemfillsNo

Yes

Yes

No

See Wiki.Lustre.org report
titled: The Effects of Fragmentation and Capacity on Lustre
File System Performance.

Highavailability

N+2 included,increases
reliability
at scale.

N+1 included,
but complex
and unreliable,gets morebrittle at scale.

Optional
Buddy
Mirroring.

N+1 included,
but complex
and unreliable, gets
more brittleat scale.

Panasas N+2 can survive any
two component failures. DDN
Lustre, GPFS and BeeGFS N+1
can survive any one component failure. Buddy Mirroring
HA doubles BeeGFS HWrequirements and cost.

NVDIMM(speedsapplicationwrites)

Yes

NoNo

No

Panasas NVDIMM accelerates
application performance.

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COMPETITIVE COMPARISON

Reliability/Tuning/Rebuild
Features

PanFS onPanasasActiveStor
Ultra

LustreDDN
Exascaler

BeeGFS

IBM
ESS
GPFS

Notes

Erasure coding Yes

Yes

No

Optional

Data protection overhead

20%

20%

140%1

20%

Snapshots

Yes

No

No

Yes

Automatic
SSD <-> HDD
tiering

Yes
Adaptive
Small Component Acceleration (ASCA).

Yes
SSD <-> HDDNo

Yes
SSD <-> HDD

For DDN and IBM, data movement latency from HDD to SSD.
For BeeGFS, customer would
have to move data between
tiers manually.

Tuning/re-tuning
required whenchanging
workload tooptimize
performance

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Panasas excels at mixed
workloads.

Declustered
RAID rebuild

Yes

Yes

NoYes

BeeGFS RAID rebuilds takesignificantly longer.

End-to-end
checksum

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

1BeeGFS = Protection by Buddy Mirroring + RAID overhead.

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COMPETITIVE COMPARISON

Data Management/Administration
Features

PanFS onPanasasActiveStorUltra

LustreDDN
Exascaler

BeeGFSIBMESSGPFS

Data scrubbing

Yes

NoNo

No

Automatic data balancing

Yes

No

No

No

Asynchronous replication

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Minimal administration effort
requiredYes

No

No

No

Estimated FTE requirement<0.25

1+1+1+In addition to scratch, reliable
enough to be used to store
home directories, applications
and general-purpose storage

Yes

No

No

No

99.99% uptime

Yes

NoNo

No

Operational headaches2

NoneUnreliable failover. Requires complex variable
striping, mostly not done.
PFL unstable, loses data.

Poor
supportfromGermany.

Complex,spottysupport.

Notes

2 Based on customer survey data and disinterested 3rd party input.

SupportFeatures

PanFS onPanasas
ActiveStorUltra

LustreDDN
Exascaler

BeeGFS

IBMESS
GPFS

Support quality2Excellent

SpottyPoor

SpottyUS-based development
organization

Yes

Yes

No
Germany-based.

Yes

US-based support
organization

Yes

Yes

No
L3 from Germany.

Yes

Notes

2 Based on customer survey data and disinterested 3rd party input.

For more information about Panasas visit www.panasas.com.

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