BeeGFS vs Lustre
BeeGFS
beegfs.io
Lustre
lustre.orgSide by side
| Figure | BeeGFS | Lustre |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 0 |
| Spec score · Distributed File System Software | 8.2 (#7) | 7.4 (#20) |
| Architecture | Its user-space services run over filesystems such as ext4, XFS, and ZFS, with metadata distributed across multiple servers. | Lustre is a distributed, POSIX-compliant file system with a client-server architecture. |
| Intended users | ThinkParQ describes its target environments as HPC, AI and deep learning, life sciences, and oil and gas. | The official site describes Lustre as supporting leadership-class HPC simulation environments, and its documentation covers deployments from smaller HPC systems to supercomputers. |
| Linux support | The native BeeGFS client and server components are available for Linux on x86_64, AMD, ARM, OpenPower, and other CPU architectures. | Lustre runs on Linux distributions including RHEL, CentOS, and SLES; server setup with ldiskfs requires a patched kernel, while the ZFS server option and client code do not require kernel patches. |
| Scale | BeeGFS can scale performance and capacity from small clusters to enterprise systems with thousands of nodes. | A Lustre file system can present hundreds of petabytes of storage to thousands of compute clients. |
| Security | BeeGFS repositories and packages are digitally signed, and its documentation describes TLS encryption for some network communication by default. | The FAQ says Lustre supports POSIX access control lists and Kerberos authentication, and enforces security on the Metadata Server using a server-local PAM-managed group database. |
Plans
In their own words
BeeGFS
BeeGFS is a parallel file system for high-performance computing, AI, and other data-intensive workloads. Its user-space services run over filesystems such as ext4, XFS, and ZFS, with metadata spread across multiple servers. It is designed to scale performance and capacity from small clusters to enterprise systems with thousands of nodes. Native client and server components are available for Linux across x86_64, AMD, ARM, OpenPower, and other CPU architectures. BeeGFS 8 Remote Storage Targets synchronize with S3 object storage, while BeeGFS Copy supports parallel copying among BeeGFS and other locally mounted file systems. System-wide monitoring and Grafana dashboards provide views of performance and system health. Hive Enterprise adds high availability, metadata and file-content mirroring, quota enforcement, and tiered storage pools. The Community Edition is free up to 1 PB of total storage and is for self-supported end users; its BeeOND use is limited to five compute nodes contributing storage. Capacity beyond 1 PB requires a subscription license. BeeGFS is available for Linux, API, and self-hosted deployment.