PVFS vs. file servers

[Josip Loncaric]

A friend of mine is trying to decide between these two options:

buying a big file server vs. 
using PVFS (see http://parlweb.parl.clemson.edu/pvfs/) 

on his cluster.  He has a cluster of Alphas running Linux, and each node
already has about 10GB of disk space available (>100GB total).  Buying a
big file server would add more disk space (ignoring the space already
available), but it would allow his nodes to be dedicated to computing
free of file serving tasks.

He runs big CFD codes and needs lots of disk space to store results and
input files.

Any comments on pros and cons?

Sincerely,
Josip

-- 
Dr. Josip Loncaric, Senior Staff Scientist        mailto:josip at icase.edu
ICASE, Mail Stop 132C           PGP key at http://www.icase.edu./~josip/
NASA Langley Research Center             mailto:j.loncaric at larc.nasa.gov
Hampton, VA 23681-2199, USA    Tel. +1 757 864-2192  Fax +1 757 864-6134