Does PVFS support redundancy? What if a node fails?
Nope! Sure doesn’t. We’ve talked about it, we have some ideas, but we haven’t implemented any redundancy. So, if an I/O node fails, PVFS accesses that need that node will also fail. Generally though, barring disk destruction, restarting the node (and sometimes restarting the other PVFS daemons) will get you right back where you were, no data lost. PVFS will run on top of RAID file systems, however. This can provide at least some measure of redundancy at the disk level. It does not protect against more catistrophic hardware failures such as IDE controller failure or spontaneous combustion.
