[Gluster-users] Need a quick answer on "Distributed Replicated Storage" questions

[Jonathan Bayles]

Hi all,

I am attempting to prevent my company from having to buy a SAN to backend our virtualization platform(xenServer). Right now we have a light workload and 4 dell 2950's (6disks, 1 controller each) to leverage against the storage side. I like what I see in regard to the "Distributed Replicated Storage" where you essentially create a RAID 10 of bricks. This would work very well for me. The question is, how do I serve this storage paradigm to a front end that's expecting an NFS share or an iSCSI target? Does gluster enable me to access the entire cluster from a single IP? Or is it something I could run on a centos cluster (luci and ricci) and use the cluster suite to present the glustered file system in the form of an NFS share?

Let me back up and state my needs/assumptions:

* A storage cluster with the capacity equal to at least 1 node(assuming all nodes are the same).

* I need to be able to lose/take down any one brick in the cluster at any time without a loss of data.

* I need more than the throughput of a single server, if not in overall speed, then in width.

* I need to be able to add more bricks in and have the expectation of increased storage capacity and throughput.

* I need to present the storage as a single entity as an NFS share or a iSCSI target.

If there are any existing models out there please point me too them, I don't mind doing the work I just don't want to re-invent the wheel. Thanks in advance for your time and effort, I know what its like to have to answer newbie questions!