[Gluster-users] Single server (NAS) and gluster advantages

[Sean Davis]

We have a largish NAS, a single linux box, with 40 drives.  They are
currently configured as 2 RAID-6 arrays.  The machine has two RAID
controllers.  This serves as a file system for a small cluster with about 10
nodes, 60 processors, total.  We have some very IO-intensive applications
that simply crush our NAS.  Load averages go to 40+ and we see about 40%
wait.  The RAID is incredibly fast with about 700 MB/second serial read, but
the sustained concurrent access is much lower.  We would like to look at how
gluster could be used to speed up concurrent access to this single machine.
Any insights into using gluster in this type of situation?  We thought about
slicing up the 40 drives into 8 RAID-5 partititions and then serving them
using gluster.  We wanted to stay away from full AFR given the increased
cost/TB.  We are mainly interested in knowing whether we need another
machine or whether we can make do with our current NAS after reconfiguring
to use gluster.

Thanks,
Sean
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