[Gluster-users] Best practices?

[Brian Candler]

Suppose I start building nodes with (say) 24 drives each in them.

Would the standard/recommended approach be to make each drive its own
filesystem, and export 24 separate bricks, server1:/data1 .. 
server1:/data24 ?  Making a distributed replicated volume between this and
another server would then have to list all 48 drives individually.

At the other extreme, I could put all 24 drives into some flavour of stripe
or RAID and export a single filesystem out of that.

It seems to me that having separate filesystems per disk ould be the easiest
to understand and to recover data from, and allow volume 'hot spots' to be
measured and controlled, at the expense of having to add each brick
separately into a volume.

I was trying to find some current best-practices or system design guidelines
on the wiki, but unfortunately a lot of what I find is marked "out of date",
e.g.
http://gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/Guide_to_Optimizing_GlusterFS
http://gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/Best_Practices_v1.3
[the latter is not marked out of date, but links to pages which are]

Also the glusterfs3.2 admin guide seems to dodge this issue, assuming you
already have your bricks prepared before telling you how to add them into a
volume.

But if you can point me at some recommended reading, I'd be more than happy
to read it :-)

Thanks,

Brian.