[Gluster-users] Stripe volumes questions

[Emmanuel Noobadmin]

Thanks for the reply. The documentation did mention stripe is best for
HPC but I couldn't really tell what exactly did that mean. Your
explanation of "very large files that are written
once or only written to rarely," made it very clear striping won't
work for the situation I have in mind :)


On 11/2/10, Jacob Shucart <jacob at gluster.com> wrote:
> Emmanuel,
>
> Regular stripe is the same as distributed stripe.  In 3.1, you can expand
> a striped volume, but you have to expand it by the number of servers in
> the stripe configuration.  For example, if you have a stripe volume with 4
> servers, you can expand that volume if you add another 4 servers.  You
> cannot expand from 3 to 4.  Before using stripe, it is a good idea to
> understand where stripe will work and where it will not work.  It is
> intended for environments where you have very large files that are written
> once or only written to rarely, and those files are read by a large number
> of clients simultaneously.  The reason there is so much focus on write is
> because even small changes can cause a significant amount of re-writing in
> the data when in a stripe volume as the data needs to be restriped.
>
> -Jacob
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: gluster-users-bounces at gluster.org
> [mailto:gluster-users-bounces at gluster.org] On Behalf Of Emmanuel Noobadmin
> Sent: Monday, November 01, 2010 12:56 PM
> To: Gluster General Discussion List
> Subject: [Gluster-users] Stripe volumes questions
>
> Gluster 3.0.x documentation doesn't mention stripe volume but the 3.1
> documentation (not linked but googled) mentions stripe only in
> conjunction with distributed stripe. Does this mean that plain stripe
> is no longer available as an option?
>
> Earlier 2.x documentation mentions that striped volume cannot be
> expanded after setup. Does this hold true for 3.x or is this why plain
> striped is no longer available and distributed stripe can get around
> this limitation?
>
> Fundamentally, my concern is that if I start with a 4 volume
> distributed or plain stripe to present a single large file (such as a
> virtual disk) to the client machine, would I be able to expand
> subsequently by adding more volumes/server?
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