There's a lot of hype around distributed file systems and their relatives, such as object stores. Every week, it seems, there's a new project claiming to be the the fastest, most scalable, most robust, most space-efficient distributed file system ever, sweeping all precursors before it. Nine times out of ten …
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Content From hekafs.org
Life on the Server Side
Of all the projects I've proposed or worked on for GlusterFS, New Style Replication (NSR) is one of the most ambitious. It has two major goals:
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Improved handling of network partitions
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Improved performance, both normally and during repair
Personally, I consider the improved partition handling to be the more important …
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Storage Benchmarking Sins
I've written and talked many times about storage benchmarking. Mostly, I've focused on how to run tests and analyze results. This time, I'd like to focus on the parts that come before that - how you set up the system so that you have at least some chance of getting a …
read moreWannabe of the Month: Skylable
Every month or two, someone comes along and claims to be the new Best Thing Ever in distributed file storage. More often than not, it's just another programmer who recently discovered things like consistent hashing and replication, then slapped together another HTTP object store because that's what people nowadays do …
read moreInktank Acquisition
I know a lot of people are going to be asking me about Red Hat's acquisition of Inktank, so I've decided to collect some thoughts on the subject. The very very simple version is that I'm delighted. Occasional sniping back and forth notwithstanding, I've always been a huge fan of …
read moreNew Style Replication
This afternoon, I'll be giving a talk about (among other things) my current project at work - New Style Replication. For those who don't happen to be at Red Hat Summit, here's some information about why, what, how, and so on.
First, why. I'm all out of tact and diplomacy right …
read moreTiers Without Tears
A lot of people have asked when GlusterFS is going to have support for tiering or Hierarchical Storage Management, particularly to stage data between SSDs and spinning disks. This is a pretty hot topic for these kinds of systems, and many - e.g. Ceph, HDFS, Swift - have announced upcoming support …
read moreSAN Stalwarts and Wistful Thinking
I've often said that open-source distributed storage solutions such as GlusterFS and Ceph are on the same side in a war against more centralized proprietary solutions, and that we have to finish that war before we start fighting over the spoils. Most recently I said that on Hacker News, in …
read moreGlusterFS 3.5 Features
It's time to let some cats out of some bags. As my loyal readers (yeah right) have surely noticed, things have been quiet around here. Part of that has been the result of vacations and such, but also there's a lot of stuff I just haven't felt ready to write …
read moreLies, Damn Lies, and Parallels