[Gluster-users] gluster, where have you been all my life?

[Jonathan Endersby]

Hi All

I've been looking for something like Gluster for a while and stumbled on it
today via the wikipedia pages on Filesystems etc.

I have a few very very simple questions that might even be too simple to be
on the FAQ, but if you think any of them are decent please add them there.

I think it might help if I start with what I want to achieve, then ask the
questions. We want to build a high uptime, storage solution that can scale
easily, but we want to do it on the cheap, with normal SATA disks and
"consumer" motherboards etc. We'll use GigE to connect the nodes.
Performance is not such a big criteria since the required throughput is
nothing spectacular.

Based on what I've read I think we should use:

1. Unify translator (to present one big FS to my systems master server)
2. AFR (to make my data redundant ... I'd like to try and avoid using RAID
on the nodes.)

So my questions are:

1. Is there anything blindingly wrong with what I'm suggesting?
2. Should I use AFR to achieve redundancy?
2. What is the minimum number of machines/bricks in the cluster that will
support data redundancy with AFR?
3. The AFR docs seem to indicate that it keeps a copy of the file on *every*
node... isn't that wasting a lot of space? I really just need 2 copies or
three copies so that one node or 2 nodes can go down at a time.

I'm sure I'll have lots more questions but for now that should point me in
the right direction.

Regards
J.
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