Dan Hanks wrote:
Lately I've been looking into distributed/cluster filesystems and wanted
to see if other people have had experience and recommendations in this
area.
In a utopian world, I'd love to see a storage cluster, where to add to
the storage capacity, all I'd have to do is add another commodity
machine with whatever storage it happened to have and tell the system to
add its storage
to the cluster.
Well, I've just put together this kind of system. I'm working with my
employer to release it as open source software. My system aims for high
reliability and simplicity.
I've been looking into Lustre (http://www.lustre.org/), and it looks to
be a close contender, but still has a bit to go in terms of my utopian
world above.
IMHO and AFAIK, Lustre aims for high speed rather than reliability and
ease of administration. It expects each node to be very reliable.
Mogilefs (http://www.danga.com/mogilefs/) seems to be another possibility.
IMHO Mogilefs is currently the best of the open source systems because:
- It's simple and short
- You can balance reliability vs. storage cost per file by adjusting
the number of replicas
- It's running now
However:
- MogileFS is not a POSIX filesystem
- MogileFS is currently missing features like scanning all files
I'd love to be able to replace a NetApp with such a cluster. Lots of
potential cost-savings, etc. Essentially, I'm looking for something like
GoogleFS, but able to handle any size file.
I think the existence of GoogleFS is inspiring a lot of people to build
their own storage systems rather than buy from the big, proprietary
companies. Within a few years, building your own thousand-drive cluster
is going to be easy.
About the hardware: if you're building a few terabytes, the best
hardware deal I've found is at coraid.com. My employer won't consider
buying from them because they're not a huge company, but if everyone on
the list buys from them, maybe coraid will grow and we'll be able to buy
from them after all! ;-)
Shane
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