[Gluster-users] glusterfs alternative ? :P

[Jerker Nyberg]

On Mon, 12 Jan 2009, Keith Freedman wrote:

> The advantages gluster has over all the other cluster filesystems out
> there are:

The concept "cluster file system" may sometimes be confusing since it may 
mean both a shared disk file system (like OCFS, GFS) and a distributed 
file system intended for cluster usage (like GlusterFS, Lustre, PVFS and 
Ceph).

> 1) you can use commodity hardware without having to build additional
> infrastructure (you don't need a SAN, just the same computers
> connected to the same network will do the trick)

As far as I know all parallel distributed file systems (PVFS, Lustre, 
GlusterFS, Ceph, etc) may be run on commodity hardware. However, to get 
redundancy or failover for Lustre and PVFS you need shared block storage.

The shared disk ones (OCFS, GFS) do of course not support this.

> 2) replica's (ha/afr, whatever) needn't be physically connected (or
> connected by anything but a network connection.   While it might be a
> tad slow, it will work exactly the same over a wide area as within a
> data center.

Both Ceph and GlusterFS share this advantage which in my opinion make them 
both very interesting. (And I am ignoring solutions with DRBD for Lustre 
and PVFS.)

Regards,
Jerker Nyberg.