Using HDFS as native storage

[Robert Krüger]

Hi,
we're looking for options for creating a scalable storage solution based 
on commodity hardware for media files (spacewise dominated video files 
of a few hundred MB but also to store up to a few million smaller files 
such as thumbnails). The system will start with a few TB and should be 
able to scale to about a PB.

Is anyone using HDFS for native storage for critical files or is it just 
common to use HDFS for large amounts of temporary more or less 
non-critical data? What would be the trade-offs to decide whether to use 
HDFS or something like GlusterFS? Note that we'r ecurrently not planning 
on using MapReduce.

Thanks in advance,

Robert