[Gluster-devel] Gluster tiering feature

[Dan Lambright]

Myself, Joseph Fernandez, and others have been working on a tiering feature for gluster. We are in the prototype phase and demoed some code recently internally to Red Hat. In its first incarnation it resembles the server side cache tier Ceph has, or dm-cache in the kernel. So, fast storage and slow storage are exposed as a single volume, data that is frequently used makes its way to fast storage, and the system responds dynamically to changing usage. Because migration between tiers is time consuming, a cache tier is a good fit for workloads where the set of hot data is stable. A cache tier can be added or removed at run-time. The tiering logic is very general-purpose infrastructure, and can be used for elaborate data placement graphs or other data migration features.

The design is in early stages.. but current thinking can be found on the feature page and the links below, and all the code is on the forge.

http://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/Features/data-classification

goo.gl/bkU5qv

Thanks,
Dan