[Gluster-users] GlusterFS vs. NFS

[John Madden]

Brian J Mingus wrote:
> We recently purchased a new cluster and I have been advocating the use of
> glusterfs. I have a lot of experience on the user side with nfs and my
> feeling is that it has poor performance. I suggested gluster which got
> relayed to our vendor and this is what they relayed back to me:
> 
>    - Suggests we stay away from glusterfs and gfs
>    - glusterfs is not mature
>    - We need a stable parallel file system. nfs is stable, glusterfs is not.
>    - Using gluster would be adding complexity and removing reliability.

You have all of this hardware, why not test it and prove its utility 
within your organization?  IMO, you have to consider The One Truth about 
vendors: You can't trust 'em.

Personally, I've found NFS to out-perform GlusterFS and on two occasions 
now have had to switch back to it from a glusterfs rollout.  That is 
likely configuration-dependent though, so it's hard to really point my 
finger at GlusterFS itself.  And it's worth noting that using NFS means 
I'm not using a parallel filesystem, so there is no redundancy, and 
redundancy is worth a lot.

John





-- 
John Madden
Sr UNIX Systems Engineer
Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana
jmadden at ivytech.edu