[Gluster-users] distributed storage and computing

[Tim van Elteren]

Dear Gluster Community,

After researching a number of distributed file systems for deployment in a
production environment with the main purpose of performing both batch and
real-time distributed computing I've identified Gluster as a potential
solution.

The key properties that our system should exhibit:

- an open source, liberally licensed, yet production ready, e.g. a mature, *
reliable*, community and commercially supported solution;
- ability to run on commodity hardware, preferably be designed for it;
- provide high availability of the data with the most focus on reads;
- high scalability, so operation over multiple data centres, possibly
global;
- removal of single points of failure with the use of replication and
distribution of (meta-)data.

The sensitivity points that were identified, and resulted in the following
questions, are:

1) transparency to the processing layer / application with respect to data
locality, e.g. know where data is physically located on a server level,
mainly for resource allocation and fast processing, high performance, how
can this be accomplished using GlusterFS?

2) posix compliance, or conformance: hadoop for example isn't posix
compliant by design, what are the pro's and con's? What is GlusterFSs
approach with respect to support for posix operations?

3) mainly with respect to evaluating the production readiness of GlusterFS,
where is it currently used in production environments and for what specific
usecases it seems most suitable? Are there any known issues / common
pitfalls and workarounds available?

I realize that I've posed quite a lot of questions above but any answer or
help, or links to where the information could be found, are very much
appreciated :) In addition, specifically for GlusterFS:

4) It seems Gluster has the advantage in Geo replication versus for example
Ceph. What are the main advantages here?
5) Finally what would be the most compelling reason to go for Gluster and
not for the alternatives?

I'm looking forward to your replies. Thanks in advance! :)

With kind regards,

Tim van Elteren
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