GPFS has an amazing number of features, offers high performance and, given a certain fiddliness of configuration and administration, is reliable and performant. It can even sit on top of block storage that itself manages with advanced software RAID and volume management.
The problem (surprise!) is IBM. It's mature software, which means 21st Century Desperate IBM sees it as a cash cow - aggressively squeezing customers - and as something they can let their senior, expensive developers move on from - or lay them off in favor of "rightsourcing". You can certainly trust your data to it (unlike Lustre), but it'll be very expensive, especially on an ongoing basis, and the support team isn't going to know more than you by then. Also expect surprise visits from IBM licensing ninja squads looking for violations of the complex terms, which they will find.
As for Lustre, it brings to mind Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr's, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough". I've been at least peripherally involved with it since 1999, with LLNL trying to strong-arm storage vendors into support. Someone should write a book following 16 years of the tangled Lustre trail from LLNL/CMU/CFS -> Sun -> Oracle -> WhamCloud -> OpenSFS -> ClusterStor -> Xyratex -> Seagate -> Intel (and probably ISIS too).
The answer to your question IHMO, is that Intel just isn't that smart. They're basically a PR firm with a good fab in the basement. What do they know about storage or so many other things? People don't remember when they tried to corner the web serving market back during the 1st Internet boom. They fail a lot, but until now had enough of a cash torrent coming that it didn't matter. They still do, of course, but there are inklings of an ebb.
Yeah, yeah, GPFS was one of them that inspired my HPC and cloud comparison. It, combined with management software, got one to about 80-90% of what they needed for cloud filesystems. It was badass back when I read about it being deployed in ASC Purple. I didn't know it turned into some stagnating, fascist crap with IBM. Sad outcome for such great technology.
The problem (surprise!) is IBM. It's mature software, which means 21st Century Desperate IBM sees it as a cash cow - aggressively squeezing customers - and as something they can let their senior, expensive developers move on from - or lay them off in favor of "rightsourcing". You can certainly trust your data to it (unlike Lustre), but it'll be very expensive, especially on an ongoing basis, and the support team isn't going to know more than you by then. Also expect surprise visits from IBM licensing ninja squads looking for violations of the complex terms, which they will find.
As for Lustre, it brings to mind Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr's, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough". I've been at least peripherally involved with it since 1999, with LLNL trying to strong-arm storage vendors into support. Someone should write a book following 16 years of the tangled Lustre trail from LLNL/CMU/CFS -> Sun -> Oracle -> WhamCloud -> OpenSFS -> ClusterStor -> Xyratex -> Seagate -> Intel (and probably ISIS too).
The answer to your question IHMO, is that Intel just isn't that smart. They're basically a PR firm with a good fab in the basement. What do they know about storage or so many other things? People don't remember when they tried to corner the web serving market back during the 1st Internet boom. They fail a lot, but until now had enough of a cash torrent coming that it didn't matter. They still do, of course, but there are inklings of an ebb.