[Gluster-users] GlusterFS compared to KosmosFS (now called cloudstore)?

[Stas Oskin]

Hi.

Thanks for all the answers.

I should say that indeed  especially the metaserver-less (P2P?) approach of
GlusterFS makes it a very attractive option, as it basically cancels any
single points of failure.

My largest concert over GlusterFs is really the luck of central
administration tool. Modifying the configuration files on every
server/client with every topology change becomes a hurdle on 10 servers
already, and probably impossbile beyond 100.

Hence, I'm happy to hear version 1.4 will have some kind of a web interface.
The only questions are:

1) Will it support a central management of all serves/clients, including the
global AFR settings?

2) When it comes out? :)

Regards.

2008/10/20 Vikas Gorur <vikasgp at gmail.com>

> 2008/10/18 Stas Oskin <stas.oskin at gmail.com>:
> > Hi.
> >
> > I'm evaluating GlusterFS for our DFS implementation, and wondered how it
> > compares to KFS/CloudStore?
> >
> > These features here look especially nice
> > (http://kosmosfs.sourceforge.net/features.html). Any idea what of them
> exist
> > in GlusterFS as well?
>
> Stas,
>
> Here's how GlusterFS compares to KFS, feature by feature:
>
> > Incremental scalability:
>
> Currently adding new storage nodes requires a change in the config
> file and restarting servers and clients. However, there is no need to
> move/copy data or perform any other maintenance steps. "Hot add"
> capability is planned for the 1.5 release.
>
> > Availability
>
> GlusterFS supports n-way data replication through the AFR translator.
>
> > Per file degree of replication
>
> GlusterFS used to have this feature, but it was dropped due to lack
> of interest. It would not be too hard to bring it back.
>
> > Re-balancing
>
> The DHT and unify translators have extensive support for distributing
> data across nodes. One can use unify schedulers to define file creation
> policies such as:
>
> * ALU - Adaptively (based on disk space utilization, disk speed, etc.)
> schedule file creation.
>
> * Round robin
>
> * Non uniform (NUFA) - prefer a local volume for file creation and use
> remote
> ones only when there is no space on the local volume.
>
> > Data integrity
>
> GlusterFS arguably provides better data integrity since it runs over
> an existing filesystem, and does not access disks at the block level.
> Thus in the worst case (which shouldn't happen), even if GlusterFS
> crashes, your data will still be readable with normal tools.
>
> > Rack-aware data placement
>
> None of our users have mentioned this need until now, thus GlusterFS
> has no rack awareness. One could incorporate this intelligence into
> our cluster translators (unify, afr, stripe) quite easily.
>
> > File writes and caching
>
> GlusterFS provides a POSIX-compliant filesystem interface. GlusterFS
> has fine-tunable caching translators, such as read-ahead (to read ahead),
> write-behind (to reduce write latency), and io-cache (caching file data).
>
> > Language support
>
> This is irrelevant to GlusterFS since it is mounted and accessed as a
> normal
> filesystem, through FUSE. This means all your applications can run on
> GlusterFS
> without any modifications.
>
> > Deploy scripts
>
> Users have found GlusterFS to be so simple to setup compared to other
> cluster filesystems that there isn't really a need for deploy scripts. ;)
>
> > Local read optimization
>
> As mentioned earlier, if your data access patterns justify it (that
> is, if users generally access local data and only occassionly want
> remote data), you can configure 'unify' with the NUFA scheduler to achieve
> this.
>
> In addition, I'd like to mention two particular strengths of GlusterFS.
>
> 1) GlusterFS has no notion of a 'meta-server'. I have not looked through
> KFS' design in detail, but the mention of a 'meta-server' leads me to
> believe that failure of the meta-server will take the entire cluster
> offline.
> Please correct me if the impression is wrong.
>
> GlusterFS on the other hand has no single point of failure such as central
> meta server.
>
> 2) GlusterFS 1.4 will have a web-based interface which will allow
> you to start/stop GlusterFS, monitor logs and performance, and do
> other admin activities.
>
>
> Please contact us if you need further clarifications or details.
>
> Vikas Gorur
> Engineer - Z Research
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://supercolony.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/attachments/20081020/088b7e67/attachment.html>