XFS Companies

These are companies that either use XFS or have a product that utilizes XFS .

Info gathered from: XFS Users on oss.sgi.com

Dell's HPC NFS Storage Solution

"The Dell NFS Storage Solution (NSS) is a unique new storage solution providing cost-effective NFS storage as an appliance. Designed to scale from 20 TB installations up to 80 TB of usable space, the NSS is delivered as a fully configured, ready-to-go storage solution and is available with full hardware and software support from Dell. ... XFS was chosen for the NSS because XFS is capable of scaling beyond 16 TB and provides good performance for a broad range of applications."

More information is available in this solution guide.

The Linux Kernel Archives

"A bit more than a year ago (as of October 2008) kernel.org, in an ever increasing need to squeeze more performance out of it's machines, made the leap of migrating the primary mirror machines (mirrors.kernel.org) to XFS. We site a number of reasons including fscking 5.5T of disk is long and painful, we were hitting various cache issues, and we were seeking better performance out of our file system."

"After initial tests looked positive we made the jump, and have been quite happy with the results. With an instant increase in performance and throughput, as well as the worst xfs_check we've ever seen taking 10 minutes, we were quite happy. Subsequently we've moved all primary mirroring file-systems to XFS, including www.kernel.org , and mirrors.kernel.org. With an average constant movement of about 400mbps around the world, and with peaks into the 3.1gbps range serving thousands of users simultaneously it's been a file system that has taken the brunt we can throw at it and held up spectacularly."

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

"The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is an ambitious effort to map one-quarter of the sky at optical and very-near infrared wavelengths and take spectra of 1 million extra-galactic objects. The estimated amount of data that will be acquired over the 5 year lifespan of the project is 15TB, however, the total amount of storage space required for object informational databases, corrected frames, and reduced spectra will be several factors more than this. The goal is to have all the data online and available to the collaborators at all times. To accomplish this goal we are using commodity, off the shelf (COTS) Intel servers with EIDE disks configured as RAID50 arrays using XFS. Currently, 14 machines are in production accounting for over 18TB. By the scheduled end of the survey in 2005, 50TB of XFS disks will be online serving SDSS data to collaborators and the public."

"For complete details and status of the project please see http://www.sdss.org. For details of the storage systems, see the SDSS Storage Server Technical Note (Dan Yocum, Fermi National Lab, November 9 2001, archived)."

The DØ Experiment at Fermilab

"At the DØ experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory we have a ~150 node cluster of desktop machines all using the SGI-patched kernel. Every large disk (>40Gb) or disk array in the cluster uses XFS including 4x640Gb disk servers and several 60-120Gb disks/arrays. Originally we chose reiserfs as our journaling filesystem, however, this was a disaster. We need to export these disks via NFS and this seemed perpetually broken in 2.4 series kernels. We switched to XFS and have been very happy. The only inconvenience is that it is not included in the standard kernel. The SGI guys are very prompt in their support of new kernels, but it is still an extra step which should not be necessary."

Ciprico DiMeda NAS Solutions

"The Ciprico DiMeda line of Network Attached Storage solutions combine the ease of connectivity of NAS with the SAN like performance levels required for digital media applications. The DiMeda 3600 provides high availability and high performance through dual NAS servers and redundant, scalable Fibre Channel RAID storage. The DiMeda 1700 provides high performance files services at a low price by using the latest Serial ATA RAID technology. All DiMeda systems are based on Linux and use XFS as the filesystem. We tested a number of filesystem alternatives and XFS was chosen because it provided the highest performance in digital media applications and the journaling feature ensures rapid failover in our dual node fault tolerant configurations."

The Quantum Guardian™ 14000

"The Quantum Guardian™ 14000, the latest Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution from Quantum, delivers 1.4TB of enterprise-class storage for less than $25,000. The Guardian 14000 is a Linux-based device which utilizes XFS to provide a highly reliable journaling filesystem with simultaneous support for Windows, UNIX, Linux and Macintosh environments. As dedicated appliance optimized for fast, reliable file sharing, the Guardian 14000 combines the simplicity of NAS with a robust feature set designed for the most demanding enterprise environments. Support for tools such as Active Directory Service (ADS), UNIX Network Information Service (NIS) and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) provides ease of management and seamless integration. Hardware redundancy, Snapshots and StorageCare™ on-site service ensure security for business-critical data."

BigStorage K2~NAS

"At BigStorage we pride ourselves on tailoring our NAS systems to meet our customer's needs, with the help of XFS we are able to provide them with the most reliable Journaling Filesystem technology available. Our open systems approach, which allows for cross-platform integration, gives our customers the flexibility to grow with their data requirements. In addition, BigStorage offers a variety of other features including total hardware redundancy, snapshotting, replication and backups directly from the unit. All of our products include BigStorage�s 24/7 LiveResponse™ support. With LiveResponse™, we keep our team of experienced technical experts on call 24 hours a day, every day, to ensure that your storage investment remains online, all the time."

Echostar DishPVR 721

"Echostar uses the XFS filesystem for its latest generation of satellite receivers, the DP721. Echostar chose XFS for its performance, stability and unique set of features."

"XFS allowed us to meet a demanding requirement of recording two mpeg2 streams to the internal hard drive while simultaneously viewing a third pre-recorded stream. In addition, XFS allowed us to withstand unexpected power loss without filesystem corruption or user interaction."

"We tested several other filesystems, but XFS emerged as the clear winner."

Sun Cobalt RaQ™ 550

From the features page:

"XFS is a journaling file system capable of quick fail over recovery after unexpected interruptions. XFS is an important feature for mission-critical applications as it ensures data integrity and dramatically reduces startup time by avoiding FSCK delay."

Center for Cytometry and Molecular Imaging at the Salk Institute

"I run the Center for Cytometry and Molecular Imaging at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA. We're a core facility for the Institute, offering flow cytometry, basic and deconvolution microscopy, phosphorimaging (radioactivity imaging) and fluorescent imaging."

"I'm currently in the process of migrating our data server to Linux/XFS. Our web server currently uses Linux/XFS. We have about 60 Gb on the data server which has a 100Gb SCSI RAID 5 array. This is a bit restrictive for our microscopists so in order that they can put more data online, I'm adding another machine, also running Linux/XFS, with about 420 Gb of IDE-RAID5, based on Adaptec controllers...."

"Servers are configured with quota and run Samba, NFS, and Netatalk for connectivity to the mixed bag of computers we have around here. I use the CVS XFS tree most of the time. I have not seen any problems in the several months I have been testing."

Coltex Retail Group BV

"Coltex Retail group BV in the Netherlands uses Red Hat Linux with XFS for their main database server which collects the data from over 240 clothing retail stores throughout the Netherlands. Coltex depends on the availability of the server for over 100 hundred employees in the main office for retrieval of logistical and sales figures. The database size is roughly 10GB large containing both historical and current data."

"The entire production and logistical system depends on the availability of the system and downtime would mean a significant financial penalty. The speed and reliability of the XFS filesystem which has a proven track record and mature tools to go with it is fundamental to the availability of the system."

"XFS has saved us a lot of time during testing and implementation. A long filesystems check is no longer needed when bad things happen when they do. The increased speed of our database system which is based on Progress 9.1C is also a nice benefit to this filesystem."

DKP Effects

"We're a 3D computer graphics/post-production house. We've currently got four fileservers using XFS under Linux online - three 350GB servers and one 800GB server. The servers are under fairly heavy load - network load to and from the dual NICs on the box is basically maxed out 18 hours a day - and we do have occasional lockups and drive failures. Thanks to Linux SW RAID5 and XFS, though, we haven't had any data loss, or significant down time."

Epigenomics

"We currently have several IDE-to-SCSI-RAID systems with XFS in production. The largest has a capacity of 1.5TB, the other 2 have 430GB each."

"Data stored on these filesystems is on the one hand "normal" home directories and corporate documents and on the other hand scientific data for our laboratory and IT department."

Incyte Genomics

"I'm currently in the process of slowly converting 21 clusters totaling 2300+ processors over to XFS."

"These machines are running a fairly stock RH7.1+XFS. The application is our own custom scheduler for doing genomic research. We have one of the worlds largest sequencing labs which generates a tremendous amount of raw data. Vast amounts of CPU cycles must be applied to it to turn it into useful data we can then sell access to."

"Currently, a minority of these machines are running XFS, but as I can get downtime on the clusters I am upgrading them to 7.1+XFS. When I'm done, it'll be about 10TB of XFS goodness... across 9G disks mostly."

Monmouth University

"We've replaced our NetApp filer (80GB, $40,000). NetApp ONTAP software [runs on NetApp filers] is basically an NFS and CIFS server with their own proprietary filesystem. We were quickly running out of space and our annual budget almost depleted. What were we to do?"

"With an off-the-shelf Dell 4400 series server and 300GB of disks ($8,000 total). We were able to run Linux and Samba to emulate a NetApp filer."

"XFS allowed us to manage 300GB of data with absolutely no downtime (now going on 79 days) since implementation. Gone are the days of fearing the fsck of 300GB."

The University of Wisconsin Astronomy Department

"At the University of Wisconsin Astronomy Department we have been using Linux XFS since the first release. We currently have 31 Linux boxes running XFS on all filesystems with about 2.6 TB of disk space on these machines. We use XFS primarily on our data reduction systems, but we also use it on our web server and on one of the remote observing machines at the WIYN 3.5m Telescope at Kitt Peak (http://www.noao.edu/wiyn/wiyn.html)."

"We will likely be using Linux XFS at least in part on the GLIMPSE program (http://www.astro.wisc.edu/sirtf/) which will likely require several TB of disk space to process the data."

The Austin Museum of Art

"The Austin Museum of Art has two file servers running RedHat 7.2_XFS upgraded from RedHat 7.1_XFS. Our webserver runs Domino on top of RedHat 7.3_XFS and we're getting about 70% better performance than the Domino server running on Windows 2000 Server. We're moving our workstations away from Windows and Microsoft Office to an LTSP server running on RedHat 7.3_XFS.

"We've become solely dependent on XFS for all of our data systems."

tecmath AG

"We use a production server with a 270 GB RAID 5 (hardware) disk array. It is based on a Suse 7.2 distribution, but with a standard 2.4.12 kernel with XFS and LVM patches. The server provides NFS to 8 Unix clients as well as Samba to about 80 PCs. The machine also runs Bind 9, Apache, Exim, DHCP, POP3, MySQL. I have tried out different configurations with ReiserFS, but I didn't manage to find a stable configuration with respect to NFS. Since I converted all disks to XFS some 3 months ago, we never had any filesystem-related problems."

The IQ Group

"Here at the IQ Group, Inc. we use XFS for all our production and development servers."

"Our OS of choice is Slackware Linux 8.0. Our hardware of choice is Dell and VALinux servers."

"As for applications, we run the standard Unix/Linux apps like Sendmail, Apache, BIND, DHCP, iptables, etc.; as well as Oracle 9i and Arkeia."

"We've been running XFS across the board for about 3 months now without a hitch (so far)."

"Size-wise, our biggest server is about 40 GB, but that will be increasing substantially in the near future."

"Our production servers are collocated so a journaled FS was a must. Reboots are quick and no human interaction is required like with a bad fsck on ext2. Additionally, our database servers gain additional integrity and robustness."

"We originally chose XFS over ReiserFS and ext3 because of it's age (it's been in production on SGI boxes for probably longer than all the other journaling FS's combined) and it's speed appeared comparable as well."

Arts IT Unit, Sydney University

"I've got XFS on a 'production' file server. The machine could have up to 500 people logged in, but typically less than 200. Most are Mac users, connected via NetAtalk for 'personal files', although there are shared areas for admin units. Probably about 30-40 windows users. (Samba) It's the file server for an Academic faculty at a University."

"Hardware RAID, via Mylex dual channel controller with 4 drives, Intel Tupelo MB, Intel 'SC5000' server chassis with redundant power and hot-swap scsi bays. The system boots off a non RAID single 9gb UW-scsi drive."

"Only system 'crash' was caused by some one accidentally unplugging it, just before we put it into production. It was back in full operation within 5 minutes. Without journaling, the fsck would have taken well over an hour. In day to day use it has run well."

Vanderbilt University Center for Structural Biology

"I run a high-performance computing center for Structural Biology research at Vanderbilt University. We use XFS extensively, and have been since the late prerelease versions. I've had nothing but good experiences with it."

"We began using XFS in our search for a good solution for our RAID fileservers. We had such good experiences with it on these systems that we've begun putting it on the root/usr/var partitions of every Linux system we run here. I even have it on my laptop these days. XFS in combination with the 2.4 NFS3 implementation performs very well for us, and we have great uptimes on these systems (Our 750GB ArenaII setup is at 143 days right now)."

"All told, we've got about 1.2TB of XFS filesystems spinning right now. It's spread out across maybe a dozen or so filesystems and will continue to increase as we are growing fast and that's all we use now. Next up is putting it on our 17-node Linux cluster, which will bring that up to 1.5TB spread across 30 filesystems."

"I, for one, would LOVE to see XFS make it into the kernel tree. From my perspectives, it's one of the best things to happen to Linux in the 7 years I've been using/administering it."

2008 Update

"We've since moved our main home directories to a proprietary NAS, but continue to use XFS on 10TB of LVM storage for doing backup-to-disk from the same NAS"

CDF Experiment at Fermi National Lab

CDF, an elementary particle physics experiment at Fermi National Lab, is using XFS for all our cache disks.

The usage model is that we have a PB tape archive (2 STK silos) as permanent storage. In front of this archive we are deploying a roughly 100TB disk cache system. The cache is made up of 50 2TB file server based on cheap commodity hardware (3ware based hardware raid using IDE drives). The data is then processed by a cluster of 300 Dual CPU Linux PC's. The cache software is dCache, a DESY/FNAL product.

The whole system is used by more than 300 active users from all over the world for batch processing for their physics data analysis.

Get2Chip, Inc.

"We are using XFS on 3 production file servers with approximately 1.5T of data. Quite impressive especially when we had a power outage and all three servers shutdown. All servers came back up in minutes with no problems! We are looking at creating two more servers that would manage 2+ TB of data store."

Lando International Group Technologies

Lando International Group Technologies is the home of:

• [www.lando.co.za Lanndo Technologies Africa (Pty) Ltd] - Internet Service Provider
• [www.lbsd.net Linux Based Systems Design] (Article 21). Not-For-Profit company established to provide free Linux distributions and programs.
• Cell Park South Africa (Pty) Ltd. RSA Pat Appln 2001/10406. Collecting parking fees by means of cell phone SMS or voice.
• Read Plus Education (Pty) Ltd. Software based reading skills training and testing for ages 4 to 100.
• Mobivan. Mobile office including Internet access, fax, copying, printing, telephone, collection and delivery services, legal services, pre-paid phone and electricity services, bill payment email, secretarial services, training facilities and management services.
• Lando International Marketing Agency. Direct marketing services, design and supply of promotional material, consulting, sourcing of capital and other funding.
• Illico. Software development and systems analysis on most platforms.

"Throughout these companies, we use the XFS filesystem with IDMS Linux on high-end Intel servers, with an average of 100 GB storage each. XFS stores our customer and user data, including credit card details, mail, routing tables, etc.. We have not had one problem since the release of the first XFS patch."

Foote, Cone, & Belding

"We are an advertisement company in Germany, and the use of the XFS filesystem is a story of success for us. In our Hamburg office, we have two file servers having a 420 Gig RAID in XFS format serving (almost) all our data to about 180 Macs and about 30 PCs using Samba and Netatalk. Some of the data is used in our offices in Frankfurt and Berlin, and in fact the Berlin office is just getting it's own 250 Gig fileserver (using XFS) right now."

"The general success with XFS has led us to switch over all our Linux servers to run on XFS as well (with the exception of two systems that are tied to tight specifications configuration wise). XFS, even the old 1.0 version, has happily taken on various abuse - broken SCSI controllers, broken RAID systems."

Moving Picture Company

"We here at MPC use XFS/RedHat 7.2 on all of our graphics-workstations and file-servers. More info can be found in an article LinuxUser magazine did on us recently."

Coremetrics, Inc.

"We are currently using XFS for 25+ production web-servers, ~900GB Oracle db servers, with potentially 15+ more servers by mid 2003, with ~900GB+ databases. All XFS installed."

"Also, our dev environment, except for the Sun boxes which all are being migrated to X86 in the aforementioned server additions, plus the dev Sun boxes as well, are all x86 dual proc servers running Oracle, application servers, or web services as needed. All servers run XFS from images we've got on our SystemImager servers."

"All production back-end servers are connected via FC1 or FC2 to a SAN containing ~13TB of raw storage, which, will soon be converted from VxFS to XFS with the migration of Oracle to our x86 platforms."

Evolt.org

"evolt.org, a world community for web developers promoting the mutual free exchange of ideas, skills and experiences, has had a great deal of success using XFS. Our primary webserver which serves 100K hosts/month, primary Oracle database with ~25Gb of data, and free member hosting for 1000 users haven't had a minute of downtime since XFS has been installed. Performance has been spectacular and maintenance a breeze."

All testimonials on this page represent the views of the submitters, and references to other products and companies should not be construed as an endorsement by either the organizations profiled, or by SGI. All trademarks (r) their respective owners.