We used Lustre, pNFS and GPFS at Stanford on HPC gear (DDN, Panasas and some enterprise COTS). Luster has a lot of moving parts and config. Most folks tend to use Puppet/Chef and/or Rocks distro to deploy clusters in a somewhat sane manner. (Sometimes AFS too but not much.)
These days, Ceph/Gluster might work, but Lustre's proven.
These days, Ceph/Gluster might work, but Lustre's proven.