[Gluster-devel] Uses for glusterfs?

Brandon Lamb brandonlamb at gmail.com
Sun Jun 3 02:46:02 UTC 2007


I am a sysadmin for an ISP and we currently have a single server 20
scsi drive raid that stores our maildir format mail data, we have
about 105 gigs of mail.

Our problem is that we have a single point of failure. We have backups
sure but if we lost our drive thats over 5 hours to copy from a backup
and getting a new server up.

So my question is, can glusterfs help in this area?

If i were to setup a 3 server cluster and say each server had its own
200 gig raid, would glusterfs put an identical copy of my mail data on
all 3 servers letting me lose up to 2 servers before i lose my data?

Or do I completely not understand what glusterfs does?

I was looking at starfish which sounds similiar to me and they claim
to be a turbo charged google filesystem.

I was initially looking at a DRBD / OCFS2 solution, but ditched that
in favor of just rebuilding our current box as it is but with a fresh
updated os but remain a single server with no live spare. The decision
was based on keeping it simple and due to not wanting to buy another
scsi raid ($$$).

But if we could put together 2 servers with SATA II raids (cheap $)
and have glusterfs replicate the data between all 3 servers that would
be cool.

I look forward to any info this list may provide.

Thanks!
=)

Brandon





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