On Sun, 2008-06-15 at 01:25 +1200, Allen Petersen wrote: > Sage, > > I've been following the development of ceph for a while now. I see a lot > of potential and am quite interested in seeing it progress. > > Currently at the place I work we have an ad-hock system for aggregating > the substantial amount of extra storage on our desktop machines > throughout the organization. I've been looking at switching to a single > distributed filesystem and ceph is my first choice. One of the major > issues though is that the majority of the boxes are running Windows.
Allen, I too would happily welcome this potential in Ceph. It is evidently quite attractive, obviously due to the plain number of Windows machines just sitting on LAN:s with disks under-utilized, idleing. While it might not be the perfect use case for Ceph, hopefully it would be doable? I'm seeing some possible issues with nodes going offline and online in a higher-than-optimal frequency, but the idea is indeed attractive! I have yet myself to actually study the code of Ceph in more depth, but I imagine that hopefully, couldn't it possibly be just a matter of configuring a slightly higher replica-rate on such a system? To cope with nodes going offline and coming online. Despite sitting in a LAN environment, it is obviously of interest to avoid having data move around too often for no real reason. Cheers, Martin Millnert PS. 2002 it would have taken 20 years to transfer all Internet-attached storage (desktop harddrives) using the then measured Internet backbone traffic volume. [ http://www.dtc.umn.edu/mints/home.html ] 2006 this had shrunk to 6 years. I have a very clear gut-feeling of a future global pooling of all connected disk capacity in a sensible, localizing, network topology-aware, smart file system. While Ceph might not be, or attempt to be, the answer to that, it is most certainly an interesting development towards this end nonetheless. This evolutionary path seems inevitable to me. Am I alone in thinking this? Apparently Google is now (I suppose have been for some time) working towards creating a single global namespace, which from what I've understood from my distributed systems classes, is quite the excercise for the reader. :) DS ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php _______________________________________________ Ceph-devel mailing list Ceph-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ceph-devel
