On 11/10/2010 19:36, Aaron Porter wrote:
On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 10:03 AM, Christopher J Bidwell
<[email protected]> wrote:
Can gluster be used as a WAN-based distributed filesystem? I've got four
servers spread around the country to provide geographic redundancy and am
looking for a good system that I can maintain continuity between the
servers. Replication, etc. Currently using rsync which is just terrible
and has a high overhead as I've got large directories that need continuous
updates.
We've got some small scale testing going (and working) West Coast (US)
-> East Coast (US). Bandwidth isn't so much of a problem as latency.
Gluster doesn't have an async mode, so you have to wait for your
operations to complete on all nodes -- that can take a while. Our
current setup backs a couple Samba shares, users seem happy.
I think the "paying customers" for gluster are HPC compute clusters
where as a class you have kind of "significant fraction of memory level
speed" between servers. As a result the current focus has been around
improving throughput for an environment which has very low latency
access to all the nodes
I think it's clear that the solution would be some kind of smart
distributed lock manager which can push the locks out to the closest
server to the client, but it's clearly not a trivial step up from the
current code base and will likely require someone to pay for it.
I think the Gluster developers might be on the cusp of being receptive
to such a feature request, but I sense at this stage its likely to need
to be accompanied by some financial commitment...
If there were some other businesses with this requirement then now is
probably a good time to show your hand. That said I would expect to
face some reasonable costs if we wanted to pay some gluster devs for
some time on this? I guess it's possible they would do it for a reduced
rate than just time and materials, but first lets see if anyone else
pipes up before we ask for prices...
GFS has such a lock manager and I would have thought in the first
instance the right answer was to investigate whether integration with
this would make sense / solve the underlying problem
Anyway, I guess the point is just because you and I find gluster useful
on commodity hardware doesn't mean we are actually the current
development target market, just lucky users!
Cheers
Ed W
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