[Gluster-users] Is RAID necessary/recommended?

[Dan Mons]

We run RAID6 with a hot spare in our Gluster nodes.  (16 drives per
node, 13 usable).  I wouldn't bother with the hot spare if I was
sitting around the 8 disk-per-node mark.

RAID10 provided no practical benefit.  All of Gluster's performance
bottlenecks are related to DHT lookups and clustering over Ethernet.
Speaking specifically for Gluster and in my use case, the disk has
never been the bottlneck.

What RAID on the bricks gives you is, as mentioned, the ability to
recover from individual drive failures without extra effort on
Gluster's behalf.  Additionally, one brick per node ensures that your
data is always replicating to a physically different machine, which
helps you in the event of a entire node failing.

Different people have different use cases, but for us (VFX/multimedia
company using Gluster as a scalable NAS/SAN replacement and shared
POSIX file system), that's worked out far better for us long-term,
with respect to maintenance.

-Dan



----------------
Dan Mons - R&D Sysadmin
Cutting Edge
http://cuttingedge.com.au


On 29 October 2014 11:53, Lindsay Mathieson <lindsay.mathieson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok, thanks James, Juan.
>
> Given my budget, I think I'll switch to using a single 3TB drive in
> each node, but add an extra 1GB Intel network card to each node and
> bond them for better network performance.
>
> Also I will be adding a third proxmox node for quorum purposes - it
> will just be a Intel NUC, won't be used for running VM's (though it
> could manage a couple).
>
> On 29 October 2014 11:10, Juan José Pavlik Salles <jjpavlik at gmail.com> wrote:
>> RAID6 is the best choice when working with arrays with many disks. RAID10
>> doesn't make sense to me since you already have replication with gluster.
>>
>> 2014-10-28 20:59 GMT-03:00 James <purpleidea at gmail.com>:
>>>
>>> On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 7:53 PM, Lindsay Mathieson
>>> <lindsay.mathieson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > I thought RAID5 was no longer considered a good option these days,
>>> > with RAID10 being preferred?
>>>
>>>
>>> RAID6 preferred
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Pavlik Salles Juan José
>> Blog - http://viviendolared.blogspot.com
>
>
>
> --
> Lindsay
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