[Gluster-devel] A big thank you for GlusterFS, comments on roadmap

[Anand Babu Periasamy]

,----[ Brent A Nelson writes: ]
| 1.3 is starting to look pretty solid to me, and I'll be strongly
| urging our big cluster folks here (as well as our campus in general)
| to try it out. GlusterFS is an amazingly flexible and simple/easy
| piece of software, and it already deserves a great deal of attention
| from the community.  Word needs to spread, and hardly anyone has
| heard of it.  Frankly, I hope it becomes the de facto standard for
| networked/distributed filesystems in general, not just for HPC
| clusters.
| 
| I will be considering a full department deployment of GlusterFS with
| version 1.4 (with its self-healing so we can do fully automated
| fault-tolerance), although even 1.3 is tempting and a major
| improvement over our existing system.  We'll be drooling over the
| TLS, quotas, snapshots, and ACLs in 1.5, and the dynamic
| reconfiguration in 1.6 will give us long-term peace-of-mind (we'll
| be able to add and remove nodes and disks whenever we need to
| without disrupting our users, every sysadmin's dream).
| 
| The encryption support in 1.8 may also be rather appealing, although
| we care most about encryption over-the-wire and not as much about
| encryption on disk; perhaps that will be provided with the TLS
| support in 1.5.  On a related note, has anyone suggested GSSAPI
| support? This would provide over-the-wire encryption as well as
| user-level rather than node-level shares.
| 
| Many, many thanks! GlusterFS is already a dream come true (and
| getting more so on an almost daily basis)!
| 
| Brent Nelson
| Director of Computing
| Dept. of Physics
| University of Florida
`----
A very inspiring feedback. We thank *you* for taking time to write
such a nice email to appreciate our team. It will be awesome if you
can write a testimonial for us at 
http://gluster.org/docs/index.php/GlusterFS_Testimonials
We have only two, as of now :(

For session encryption support, few users are already using
stunnel. They are willing to provide documentation if you are
interested. Our plan is to implement a built in GNU TLS (GPL
equivalent of OpenSSL) encryption translator, because GNU TLS will be
used for auth module anyways. I will evaluate Kerberos GSSAPI too.

We also believe GlusterFS 1.4 release will be ready for large scale
production deployment. If you really need any other feature to be
preponed to 1.4, please let us know.

I wish, I can visit Florida soon and give a crash course on GlusterFS
filesystem. 

>From the academic side, Stanford University (USA), Simon Bolivar
University (Venezuela), University of Houston (USA) and Rice
University (USA) have already started evaluating GlusterFS.

Thank you again,
-- 
Anand Babu 
GPG Key ID: 0x62E15A31
Blog [http://ab.freeshell.org]              
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