[Gluster-users] Async Replication

[Ed W]

  On 11/10/2010 19:36, Aaron Porter wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 10:03 AM, Christopher J Bidwell
> <cbidwell at usgs.gov>  wrote:
>> Can gluster be used as a WAN-based distributed filesystem?  I've got four
>> servers spread around the country to provide geographic redundancy and am
>> looking for a good system that I can maintain continuity between the
>> servers.  Replication, etc.  Currently using rsync which is just terrible
>> and has a high overhead as I've got large directories that need continuous
>> updates.
> We've got some small scale testing going (and working) West Coast (US)
> ->  East Coast (US). Bandwidth isn't so much of a problem as latency.
> Gluster doesn't have an async mode, so you have to wait for your
> operations to complete on all nodes -- that can take a while. Our
> current setup backs a couple Samba shares, users seem happy.

I think the "paying customers" for gluster are HPC compute clusters 
where as a class you have kind of "significant fraction of memory level 
speed" between servers.  As a result the current focus has been around 
improving throughput for an environment which has very low latency 
access to all the nodes

I think it's clear that the solution would be some kind of smart 
distributed lock manager which can push the locks out to the closest 
server to the client, but it's clearly not a trivial step up from the 
current code base and will likely require someone to pay for it.

I think the Gluster developers might be on the cusp of being receptive 
to such a feature request, but I sense at this stage its likely to need 
to be accompanied by some financial commitment...

If there were some other businesses with this requirement then now is 
probably a good time to show your hand.  That said I would expect to 
face some reasonable costs if we wanted to pay some gluster devs for 
some time on this?  I guess it's possible they would do it for a reduced 
rate than just time and materials, but first lets see if anyone else 
pipes up before we ask for prices...

GFS has such a lock manager and I would have thought in the first 
instance the right answer was to investigate whether integration with 
this would make sense / solve the underlying problem

Anyway, I guess the point is just because you and I find gluster useful 
on commodity hardware doesn't mean we are actually the current 
development target market, just lucky users!

Cheers

Ed W