Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat announced their pending acquisition of Inktank this morning. Sage Weil and a team of researchers at University of California Santa Cruz first published the architecture in 2007. Sage joined DreamHost after college and continued development on Ceph until DreamHost spun off a Inktank, a company focused solely on Ceph. In Sage's blog post on the acquisition, he says 'In particular, joining forces with the Red Hat team will improve our ability to address problems at all layers of the storage stack, including in the kernel.' Sage goes on to announce that Inktank's proprietary management tools for Ceph will now be open sourced, citing Red Hat's pure open source development and business models.

Ceph has seen wide adoption in OpenStack customer deployments, alongside Red Hat's existing Gluster system." Ceph looks pretty cool if you're doing serious storage: CERN has a 3 Petabyte "prototype" cluster in use now (Only tangentially related, but still interesting, is how CERN does storage in general).

An anonymous reader writes "The secret to open source innovation, and the reason for its triumphal success, has nothing to do with the desire to innovate. It's because of the four freedoms and the level playing field (and agility) that was the end result. It's like Douglas Adams' definition of flying: you don't try to fly, you throw yourself at the ground and miss. This article explains why it was never about innovation — it was always about freedom. Quoting: 'When the forces of economics put constant downward price pressure on software, developers look for other ways to derive income. Given the choice between simply submitting to economic forces and releasing no-cost software in proprietary form, developers found open source models to be a much better deal. Some of us didn't necessarily like the mechanics of those models, which included dual licensing and using copyleft as a means of collecting ransom, but it was a model in which developers could thrive.'"

Dangerous_Minds writes "GIMP, a free and open source alternative to image manipulation software like Photoshop, recently announced that it will no longer be distributing their program through SourceForge. Citing some of the ads as reasons, they say that the tipping point was 'the introduction of their own SourceForge Installer software, which bundles third-party offers with Free Software packages. We do not want to support this kind of behavior, and have thus decided to abandon SourceForge.' The policy changes were reported back in August by Gluster. GIMP is now distributing their software via their own FTP page instead." Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate parent.

Dishwasha writes "For over a decade I have had arrays of 10-20 disks providing larger than normal storage at home. I have suffered twice through complete loss of data once due to accidentally not re-enabling the notification on my hardware RAID and having an array power supply fail and the RAID controller was unable to recover half of the entire array. Now, I run RAID-10 manually verifying that each mirrored pair is properly distributed across each enclosure. I would like to upgrade the hardware but am currently severely tied to the current RAID hardware and would like to take a more hardware agnostic approach by utilizing a cluster filesystem. I currently have 8TB of data (16TB raw storage) and am very paranoid about data loss. My research has yielded 3 possible solutions: Luster, GlusterFS, and Ceph." Read on for the rest of Dishwasha's question. "Lustre is well accepted and used in 7 of the top 10 supercomputers in the world, but it has been sullied by the buy-off of Sun to Oracle. Fortunately the creator seems to have Lustre back under control via his company Whamcloud, but I am still reticent to pick something once affiliated with Oracle and it also appears that the solution may be a bit more complex than I need. Right now I would like to reduce my hardware requirements to 2 servers total with an equal number of disks to serve as both filesystem cluster servers and KVM hosts."

"GlusterFS seems to be gaining a lot of momentum now having backing from Red Hat. It is much less complex and supports distributed replication and directly exporting volumes through CIFS, but doesn't quite have the same endorsement as Lustre."

"Ceph seems the smallest of the three projects, but has an interesting striping and replication block-level driver called Rados."

"I really would like a clustered filesystem with distributed, replicated, and striped capabilities. If possible, I would like to control the number of replications at a file level. The cluster filesystem should work well with hosting virtual machines in a high-available fashion thereby supporting guest migrations. And lastly it should require as minimal hardware as possible with the possibility of upgrading and scaling without taking down data."

"Has anybody here on Slashdot had any experience with one or more of these clustered file systems? Are there any bandwidth and/or latency comparisons between them? Has anyone experienced a failure and can share their experience with the ease of recovery? Does anyone have any recommendations and why?"