[ople]

The reading of the metadata required quite a lot of random acces. We were fairly sure that if a high-end array and controller with fast disks is struggling with it, then a traditional clustered solution with slower node local disks would not fare much better. Thus we tried to find the solution which yields the highest possible IOPS.

[gnufx]

I misunderstood the bottleneck, not having had to do that. (Distributed metadata for the parallel filesystem could actually be tuned to be memory resident.)