[Gluster-users] Gluster infrastructure question

[bernhard glomm]

Hi Heiko,

some years ago I had to deliver a reliable storage that should be easy to grow in size over time.
For that I was in close contact with
presto prime who produced a lot of interesting research results accessible to the public.
http://www.prestoprime.org/project/public.en.html
what was striking me was the general concern of how and when and with which pattern hard drives will fail,
and the rebuilding time in case a "big" (i.e. 2TB+) drive fails. (one of the papers at pp was dealing in detail with that)
From that background my approach was to build relatively small raid6 bricks (9 * 2 TB + 1 Hot-Spare)
and connect them together with a distributed glusterfs.
I never experienced any problems with that and felt quite comfortable about it.
That was for just a lot of big file data exported via samba.
At the same time I used another, mirrored, glusterfs as a storage backend for 
my VM-images, same there, no problem and much less hazel and headache than drbd and ocfs2 
which I run on another system.
hth
best 

Bernhard

	 Bernhard Glomm
IT Administration

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On Dec 9, 2013, at 2:18 PM, Heiko Krämer <hkraemer at anynines.de> wrote:

> Signed PGP part
> Heyho guys,
> 
> I'm running since years glusterfs in a small environment without big
> problems.
> 
> Now I'm going to use glusterFS for a bigger cluster but I've some
> questions :)
> 
> Environment:
> * 4 Servers
> * 20 x 2TB HDD, each
> * Raidcontroller
> * Raid 10
> * 4x bricks => Replicated, Distributed volume
> * Gluster 3.4
> 
> 1)
> I'm asking me, if I can delete the raid10 on each server and create
> for each HDD a separate brick.
> In this case have a volume 80 Bricks so 4 Server x 20 HDD's. Is there
> any experience about the write throughput in a production system with
> many of bricks like in this case? In addition i'll get double of HDD
> capacity.
> 
> 2)
> I've heard a talk about glusterFS and out scaling. The main point was
> if more bricks are in use, the scale out process will take a long
> time. The problem was/is the Hash-Algo. So I'm asking me how is it if
> I've one very big brick (Raid10 20TB on each server) or I've much more
> bricks, what's faster and is there any issues?
> Is there any experiences ?
> 
> 3)
> Failover of a HDD is for a raid controller with HotSpare HDD not a big
> deal. Glusterfs will rebuild automatically if a brick fails and there
> are no data present, this action will perform a lot of network traffic
> between the mirror bricks but it will handle it equal as the raid
> controller right ?
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks and cheers
> Heiko
> 
> 
> 
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