[Gluster-users] multi petabyte gluster dispersed for archival?

[Douglas Duckworth]

Hello

I am thinking of building a Gluster file system for archival data.  Initially it will start as 6 brick dispersed volume then expand to distributed dispersed as we increase capacity.

Since metadata in Gluster isn't centralized it will eventually not perform well at scale.  So I am wondering if anyone can help identify that point?  Ceph can scale to extremely high levels though the complexity required for management seems much greater than Gluster.

The first six bricks would be a little over 2PB of raw space.  Each server will have 24 7200 RPM NL-SAS drives sans RAID.  I estimate we would max out at about 100 million files within these first six servers, though that can be reduced by having users tar their small files before writing to Gluster.   I/O patterns would be sequential upon initial copy with very infrequent reads thereafter.  Given the demands of erasure coding, especially if we lose a brick, the CPUs will be high thread count AMD Rome.  The back-end network would be EDR Infiniband, so I will mount via RDMA, while all bricks will be leaf local.

Given these variables can anyone say whether Gluster would be able to operate at this level of metadata and continue to scale?  If so where could it break, 4PB, 12PB, with that being defined as I/O, with all bricks still online, breaking down dramatically?

Thank you!
Doug


--
Thanks,

Douglas Duckworth, MSc, LFCS
HPC System Administrator
Scientific Computing Unit<https://scu.med.cornell.edu/>
Weill Cornell Medicine
E: doug at med.cornell.edu
O: 212-746-6305
F: 212-746-8690
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/attachments/20200213/b94caa96/attachment.html>