[Gluster-users] gluster usable as open source solution

[Liam Slusser]

Glad I could help, Uwe.

We do use hardware RAID inside the servers.  The reason being is
because gluster isn't block level so doing a remirror/resync with 80+
million files takes weeks - so if we lose a hard drive the rebuild
time would be unacceptable.  With hardware raid a rebuild takes only a
day or two.

We access our clusters mostly via the native fuse gluster client
because performance via the NFS client is somewhat slow.  However we
do have a few clients that connect via NFS so we can mount readonly or
that don't require a lot of performance.

liam

On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 11:13 AM, Uwe Kastens <kisteorg at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hello Liam,
>
> Thank you for sharing information. This is very kind and helpful.
>
> Indeed there are some questions:
> - Are you working with hardware raid inside the server?
> - How are you acessing the storage? NFS/gluster native?
>
> Kind Regards
>
> Uwe
>
>
>
>
> 2011/8/4 Liam Slusser <lslusser at gmail.com>
>>
>> I run two Gluster clusters in a very production roll using open source
>> Gluster, all supported in-house mostly by myself.
>>
>> We have a 4-node 240tb after raid (576tb raw) cluster supporting a
>> farm of audio transcoders.  This one was built not so much for speed
>> (its not very speedy), but to be reliable and cheap.  Over the last
>> two years we've had a few small issues but nothing major.  Very
>> reliable.  All built on commodity hardware (Supermicro chassis's,
>> Seagate 7.2k desktop harddrives).
>>
>> I also run a smaller 6-node 120tb (432tb raw) as storage for a pool of
>> public facing apache webservers.  This smaller cluster serves content
>> to feed our CDN providers which feeds all our users.  We can saturate
>> a gigabit line (with 2-3meg http objects) without issues.  (Same
>> Supermicro chassis's and Seagate 7.2k desktop harddrives)  This
>> cluster has never gone down in the last two years it has been running.
>>
>> Our two homebuilt Gluster clusters replaced nearly 1/4 of a million
>> dollars in Isilon hardware for less then the cost of the Isilon annual
>> support contract while doubling the space at the same time.  It has
>> saved our company hundreds of thousands of dollars and has been hugely
>> successful.
>>
>> You're welcome to email me offline if you would like more information.
>>
>> liam
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Uwe Kastens <kisteorg at googlemail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I looked at gluster over the past year. It looks nice but the commercial
>> > option is not so interesting, since it is not possible to evaluate a
>> > storage
>> > solution within 30 days. More than one any other storage platform its a
>> > matter of trust, if the scaling is working.
>> >
>> > So my questions to this mailinglist are:
>> > - Anybody using the open source edition in a bigger production
>> > environment?
>> > How is the expierence over a longer time?
>> > - Since gluster seems only to offer support within the enterprise
>> > version.
>> > Anybody out there how is supporting the open source edition?
>> >
>> > Regards
>> >
>> > Uwe
>> >
>> >
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>> >
>> >
>
>