What advantages does OpenSSI offer over other Single System Image clusters?
Manageability, availability, scalability and usability. Unlike other Single System Image software, OpenSSI operates with one main root filesystem which runs on one specific node, allowing other nodes to be added and removed from the cluster without disrupting the cluster environment. The single root filesystem allows changes to be made from any node and be immediately visible to the entire cluster, without the need for replication. It also allows for simple integration of additional nodes with almost any sort of hardware configuration. Although having the root filesystem on one specific node is a potential single-point-of-failure, root failover is available. OpenSSI has high-availability mechanisms for networking, filesystem and applications. The scalability advantage is not in just the number of nodes one can aggregate, but also the resource-sharing between processes on different nodes, allowing one to easily scale many applications.
