Jonathan Adams wrote: > What advantages does this give us over ZFS systems (which can do > NFS/CIFS native)
The biggest advantage, compared to NFS/CIFS, is the ability to scale out the storage deployment beyond a single or a few servers/bricks/racks. GlusterFS enables this because the design is such that performance and storage of multiple nodes can be aggregated into a single name-space while ensuring that management overhead/complexity remains low. It provides safety against node failures through in-built replication ,striping and name-space distribution. Spreading out the data over multiple nodes brings with it the benefits of reducing hot-spots in workloads and access patterns. However, when dealing with networked storage, there is always the possibility of network failures and partitions. GlusterFS provides multi-pathing and high-availability functionality that ensures clients can work without disruption. The replication functionality is also able to handle such partitions and split-brains by performing self-heal automatically. New users dont have to format the disks either. Since GlusterFS works in user-space, it can use any POSIX compatible file system in one server and create a storage cluster together with completely different file systems on other nodes. We even have GlusterFS being used on production systems over ZFS on Solaris. Regards Shehjar
