[Gluster-users] Newbie questions

[Daniel Maher]

On 05/03/2010 09:50 PM, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:

> For purpose 1, clearly I'm looking at a replicated volume. For purpose
> 2, I'm assuming that distributed is the way to go (rather than striped),
> although for reliability reasons I'd likely go replicated then
> distributed. For storage bricks, I'm looking at something like HP's

1. Yes.
2. Your call - both will work, but as you said, it's a question of in 
how many places you want the data to be. :)

> 2) Is it frowned upon to create 2 volumes out of the same physical set of
> disks? I'd like to maximize the spindle count in both volumes
> (especially the scratch volume), but will it overly degrade
> performance? Would it be better to simply create one replicated and
> distributed volume and use that for both of the above purposes?

I don't know about « frowned », but my knee-jerk response would be to 
avoid that scenario.  That said, it really all comes down to usage 
patterns ; if you're only serving data out of one volume at a time, then 
there's no problem, but if you're constantly using both...

> 3) Is it crazy to think of doing a distributed (or NUFA) volume with the
> scratch disks in the whole cluster? Especially given that we have
> nodes of many ages and see not infrequent node crashes due to bad
> memory/HDDs/user code?

Again, « crazy » is a little strong, but again, it might not hurt to 
review your usage patterns before diving into the architecture.  Who 
will access what, in what amounts, and at what speed, when ?  Once this 
has been established, you can make better informed decisions about where 
to put the data, and how to let people access it (in fact, i would 
submit that many of your questions will answer themselves :) ).


-- 
Daniel Maher <dma+gluster AT witbe DOT net>