[Gluster-users] some newbie questions

[Steve Friedman]

I'm in the process of selecting a storage cluster and, after reviewing 
the gluster sites, have the following questions and greatly appreciate 
this list's thoughts:

1) The technical FAQ lists 12 x 500 GB SATA II hard drives (I presume 
that the answer hasn't been updated to 1TB drives).  My question is: 
what are the recommendations on the server RAM and CPU?  Is the gluster 
s/w sufficiently multi-threaded and/or CPU-heavy that a quad core (or 
dual - quad core) is required?  Likewise, I presume that the RAM 
required is based merely on the underlying OS file caching.  I will be 
ordering new hardware for this cluster -- any experience not only with 
the current load on the servers (and clients) but what can I expect in 
the future (e.g., the roadmap calls out compression).

2) I've ruled out lustre because that solution does not play well with 
selinux.  Does gluster?

3) How close to the normal file semantics is a glusterFS-mounted file? 
Can I do an fseek on a file that I am in the middle of reading?


Thanks,

Steve Friedman