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Red Hat announces GFS
PSUdaemon writes "Over at Kernel Trap they have an announcment that Red Hat has released GFS under the GPL and offer it through RHN. This could potentially be a very substantial offering from Red Hat."
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Will it run on distros other than Redhat? According to the linked page, it looks like it only for redhat enterprise platforms.
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Would it be too much to ask that the writeup blurb include a ten-word summary of what makes GFS any different from any other Linux-ready filesystem? Many sites get slashdotted, making most links unusable for 12 hours or more.
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9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
What does GFS exactly do for you? Allow you to have your hard drive in another computer?
im pretty sure its "stuff that matters".
darn right-wing hippies
GFS on the GPL? From RHN? WTF?
Normally I'd ask what's the BFD? but most people would just LOL. Then other people would probably want to know if it comes on DVD or FTP, but the FAQ will explain it JIT. Now what would be really cool would be a PDA that would run it with an RGB display, but it might need extra RAM.
HTH.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
GFS allows multiple redundant storage computers to serve a whole lot of other servers for data availability purposes. It isn't just another FS like EXT* or JFS or .... It's a transparent networkable filesystem with failover and all of the other goodies needed to implement a hardcore enterprise level solution for serving needs like a million hits a minute sites, or filesharing with 50,000 users...
Say you want to create a webserver cluster that can host some big files and dynamic content and survive a slashdotting. No one machine can survive all of us hitting it for video and dynamic content at once, so you build your cluster so that the video is distribtued over several machines, the webservers are distributed over some other machines, and the layers in between the that decide which request goes to which physical hard drive holding a copy of the video are also made redundant.
Now if, after running for some time, one of the machines gets coffee spilled on it and dies, GFS will automatically route around it. The result is that a slashdotter will not be aware of the failure, and still get the video.
Meanwhile you can fix the problem and bring the downed machine back on-line again.
Red Hat Global File System (GFS) is an open source, POSIX-compliant cluster file system and volume manager that executes on Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers attached to a storage area network (SAN). It works on all major server and storage platforms supported by Red Hat. The leading (and first) cluster file system for Linux, Red Hat GFS has the most complete feature set, widest industry adoption, broadest application support, and best price/performance of any Linux cluster file system today.
Red Hat GFS allows Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers to simultaneously read and write to a single shared file system on the SAN, achieving high performance and reducing the complexity and overhead of managing redundant data copies. Red Hat GFS has no single point of failure, is incrementally scalable from one to hundreds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers, and works with all standard Linux applications.
Red Hat GFS is tightly integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and distributed through Red Hat Network. This simplifies software installation, updates, and management. Applications such as Oracle 9i RAC, and workloads in cluster computing, file, web, and email serving can become easier to manage and achieve higher throughput and availability with Red Hat GFS.
Highlights
Performance
Red Hat GFS helps Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers achieve high IO throughput for demanding applications in database, file, and compute serving. Performance can be incrementally scaled for hundreds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers using Red Hat GFS and storage area networks constructed with iSCSI or Fibre Channel.
Availability
Red Hat GFS has no single-point-of-failure: any server, network, or storage component can be made redundant to allow continued operations despite failures. In addition, Red Hat GFS has features that allow reconfigurations such as file system and volume resizing to be made while the system remains on-line to increase system availability. Red Hat Cluster Suite can be used with GFS to move applications in the event of server failure or for routine server maintenance.
Ease of Management
Red Hat GFS allows fast, scalable, high througput access to a single shared file system, reducing management complexity by removing the need for data copying and maintaining multiple versions of data to insure fast access. Integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (AS, ES, and WS) and Cluster Suite, delivered via Red Hat Network, and supported by Red Hat's award winning support team, Red Hat GFS is the world's leading cluster file system for Linux.
Advanced features
Scalable to hundreds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. Integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and delivered via Red Hat Network, comprehensive service offerings, up to 24x7 with one-hour response. Supports Intel X86, Intel Itanium2, AMD AMD64, and Intel EM64T architectures. Works with Red Hat Cluster Suite to provide high availability for mission-critical applications. Quota system for cluster-wide storage capacity management. Direct IO support allows databases to achieve high performance without traditional file system overheads. Dynamic multi-pathing to route around switch or HBA failures in the storage area network. Dynamic capacity growth while the file system remains on-line and available. Can serve as a scalable alternative to NFS. Product Information Supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, ES, and WS. Red Hat Cluster Suite support available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. Support for a wide variety of Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage area network products from leading switch, HBA, and storage array vendors. Mature, industry-leading, field-proven, open source cluster file system.
Agile Artisans
GFS allows you to share a single filesystem among a cluster of machines through fiber channel. It's like NFS, but with real local filesystem semantics (locking that WORKS, for instance) and much more reliable.
Way to go, Red Hat. This is beautiful. GFS was previously sold by Sistina - they bought the company and released it.
I read that the redhat distro has no single point of failure. do they have a stable release that uses opendlm?
I think the other people have covered the basics pretty well - plug lots of computers into one fibrechannel or possibly firewire disk or disk array.
;)) or the same with uml, Zen, etc
The second really interesting use is with virtualisation - imagine if you want all your S/390 virtual machines to share the same bsse file systems for efficiency (given the price IBM charge for mainframe disks
I was reading only the other day about the Google File System. So there are now two acronymns which are both GFS which both refer to a distributed file system. That's not going to get confusing. Nope, not at all.
Are there any distributed filesystems that don't have serious issues?
I mean, NFS has issues with security (relying on numeric user id's sent by the client is a nightmare). Locking is problematic. Different versions have severe compatibility issues.
I forget the issues with AFS, but it's successor, Coda, seems not very mature, although it is one of the more promising filesystems out there. InterMezzo is a more complete and robust implementation of the Coda featureset, but is Linux-only.
SFS looks very promising (simple, but effective), but requires NFSv3 clients and servers to interact with the kernel.
None of these filesystems allows regular users to access remote filesystems (superuser privileges are required for mounting) like with FTP.
What's so hard about getting this stuff right? And can we please have kernels that support userspace filesystem drivers (or, better, any drivers)? (Yes, I know about LUFS and FUSE).
Ok, rant over. Thoughtful comments, corrections and pointers appreciated.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
GFS has a number of useful applications. But I think the times where you could design your enterprise around the idea of a globally consistent file storage system are over: enterprises are getting more flexible, more decentralized, and people would prefer not to have to deal with IT staff over issues such as file space and permissions. And they can avoid it--since many of them make the purchasing decisions.
I don't see security in the least of features. Calling this a Global file system is a bit presumptuous, considering the lack of security prevents it from being used outside of a closed LAN segment.
Gustavo J.A.M. Carneiro
It's included in RHEL.
Released today, see more at Always Current Lineox Enterprise Linux Gets Global File System (GFS) Support.
Does anyone have any actual experience with GFS? I've been looking for an "easy" solution to clustering 2 machines that use software that is so interwoven into the base (/lib, /usr, /etc) that the plan calls for sharing the entire root across these 2 machines. I've yet to find a workable and solid solution! OpenGFS wasn't solid at all.
What is the difference between GFS, NFS and AFS? (Other than AFS's global file structure, kerberization and encryption)? Do they all do the same thing, or does GFS add something that the others don't have?
Google relies on their own custom filesystem that provides similar features: massively distributed and scalable, supporting clusters 3 orders of magnitude higher (100,000 nodes) than Red Hat GFS. Further, many life sciences companies have very large computing problems requiring large amounts of storage and hundreds of nodes to solve--hence, GFS (as could XSan from Apple) can be useful in these classes of problems.
I think you are likely correct--typical IT shops in your average enterprise will not find this useful. Any solution that depends on heavy IT administration is falling out of favor in the marketplace. But is it clear that this solution does require heavy IT administration, for the amount of nodes actually managed in a single GFS cluster? In fact, this solution may *increase* the leverage of IT admins--allowing them to manage far more resources with the same staff. That's what Google is able to do.
So, you do raise an interesting point, but I don't know if there is evidence in the marketplace suggest you are 100% correct.
They bought this technology when they bought Sistina. Sistina has been working on GFS for a long time.
I was hoping they'd do this. I think (IIRC) the original GFS for linux was (or was intended to be?) open source, then Sistina changed their minds and made it proprietary and commercial. So then there was an OpenGFS project, which never got off the ground. Now RedHat bought Sistina and they're GPLing the code.
11*43+456^2
It's released under the GPL and submitted for inclusion in the Linux kernel. In other words, what the hell are you babbling about?
Not to be a jerk but has any of the above posters heard of a san? or windows DFS. Your not going to run this file system on a single home computer. its for managing data from multiple enterprise storage devices and servers.
According to their web page, you must have a subscription to get it, which costs 2200 bucks.
Id not call that babbling, its called READING.
Perhaps elsewhere it says its free, but not there.
Therefore, the original questions stands.. why do I care?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A good test of a filesystem is how well it performs when updating millions of small files. We have this problem at work (application issue), and anyone who's run a news server is familiar with it (most news servers store messages in directories & separate files).
Chip H.
GFS was well-liked at supercomputing centers I have worked with until Sistina dropped the GPL license in favor of proprietary. They did this very suddenly and without warning. It pissed off a lot of potential users and the open source community. It has since fallen out of favor.
This move by Red Hat gives new life (and resources) to GFS beyond the OpenGFS Project that has also been continuing to work on the code.
Another recent development in this area is HP's decision to productize Lustre. Lustre is perhaps the most prominent and promising HPC filesystem.
SGI also announced a major deal last week involving Luster:
The new file system is expected to sustain write rates in excess of 8GB/sec and demonstrate single client write rates of more than 600MB/sec. To achieve this performance, the new file system will leverage Lustre, an open source, object-oriented file system with development lead by Cluster File System Inc., with funding from DOE. Lustre currently is used on four of the top five supercomputers, including the PNNL cluster based on 1,900 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors.
Cool. Faster than light communication. How are they doing this? Quantum entaglement?
Contrary to popular belief the world is not nurb432-centric. Many other people (including myself) care about SANs, and can afford a small licensing fee (2200 USD is small compared to other solutions like XSan, which is 5000 USD, but as other people have said, if you want it for free, you can download the source, just forget any level of support).
I'm sorry you're not exposed to ERP and enterprise-level work, but many of us are. Slashdot's plugs are not exclusively for free-as-in-beer projects.
First of all I DO live in a rather large enterprise-level system ( 40,000 + user ), and yes we spend much more on our solutions,. so I do agree that 2k isn't anything in the grand scheme of things.
My point was that from RH, it better be free or its of no value. Not that its a 'me-centric' world, as you put it, as I wouldn't trust RH to keep our SAN afloat ( or anything else in our datacenter to be honest. Think IBM and Microsoft, who are both there when you get into a jam )..
However if its free and open, id care, as we could take a direct look at it and see if we can make the proper adjustments to be reliable enough, and locally supportable for our needs.
If the source IS available ( though it wasn't made clear by the default info page) I will make the adjustment in my statement.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Not to YOU of course, because you have no need for such things.
Remember, it's Free Software. That means you can pay Red Hat for it and get their support. Don't want that, fine. Now the source is available, so you can download and compile it yourself, or print it out and wipe your ass with it. Or maybe your favorite distro will download it, package it, enhance it, and include it in their next release.
I mod down all the "free iPod"-sig losers.
IBM has a product called GPFS (General Parallel File System) which has sold on AIX for several years and is offered for Linux as well. On Intel based boxes it sells for about $1000 per CPU. I wonder how IBM will react to this Open Source competition ? The IBM product has very similar function - it is also used with Oracle RAC. It originated on the RS/6000 based SP clusters but has been ported out to be used on pretty much any AIX or Linux based cluster.
-The Mad Duke
NFS also has some scalability problems. It is not a suitable mechanism for several hundred hosts to make their filesystems simultaneously available to each other. (Though, admittedly, I haven't seen anything that indicates that GFS does this either.)
-- TTK
I don't think so.
Red Hat's HA clustering software is also GPL but it doesn't run on other distros (and is not supported by Red Hat on other distros).
The code itself is open source, that is true, but "Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription [is] required" (http://www.redhat.com/software/rha/gfs/)
Red Hat Global File System (GFS) is an open source, POSIX-compliant cluster file system and volume manager... Red Hat GFS is tightly integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux... $2,200
I see their pricing is right up there with Microsoft, but at least they probably have better licensing terms (NOTE: It says it's "open source", it doesn't say anything about GPL). Also, it's "tightly integrated" with RH Enterprise, so you'll have to buy that too...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
You can thank the Microsoft marketing engine for this mentality. I have been involved a few projects where managers have either understaffed IT believing the hype that MS products really don't need staff after setup (while MS products are easier/quicker to setup, they require, in general, more hands on time in day to day ops and as you add more third party products, things can mysteriously break. If you go MS, it is even more important to get someone with deep AND wide knowledge in administration) or have suggested going with OpenSource products expecting the same level of ease of use.
While it is amusing to see a MCSE struggling to configure Postgres or MaxDB (which can be a little tricky) and complaining about the lack of a GUI (I didn't have the heart to find and install the various GUIs for them...heh), it does not sit well with the PHB to see labor costs skyrocket with no discernable work being done (from their perspective).
The moral of this rant is: even though it is free software, that does not automatically mean that you should not have to pay for the expertise to setup, run, and maintane it. RedHat (and the other commercial distros) have excellent service and tend to service smaller companies at the same level MS only does for much larger companies. PHBs should be looking for gain in long term licensing costs and flexibility. No lock-in, no artificially driven need to upgrade, no technological sea change forced upon you.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
> To achieve this performance, the new file system will leverage Lustre,
Leverage.... Lustre _is_ a file system.
Why don't they say it like it is:
"To achieve needed performance and scalability, SGI won't be using its own cluster file system but Lustre."
How does this compare to other SAN hacks like Inter Mezzo, coda or the Open Mosix File System (find text: mfs)?
This isn't a network filesystem, but a *distributed* filesystem. There is a significant difference. Also, NFS suffers from some well-known design flaws that newer network filesystems correct.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
OpenAFS provides the scalability, redundancy, and clustering that GFS does, but tends to assume that block devices are not shared. On one hand, OpenAFS is cross-platform, extremely secure, and very powerful. On the other, GFS allows the actual block devices to be shared.
I still think that OpenAFS is generally a better solution in these areas, but who knows?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
GFS is nothing like NFS, except they're both file systems. GFS is a filesystem specifically created for clusters. It means you have a lot of machines sharing a single logical file system. You can then add or remove machines from the cluster and the filesystem and all its contents remains accessible to all the nodes in the cluster. This is great for a lot of cluster tasks, such as having multiple load balanced web servers all serving the same content from a GFS system.
NFS on the other hand can be accessed from multiple machines but is ultimately hosted on one specific machine, giving you a single point of failure.
It's like deja vu all over again.
Normally I'd ask what's the BFD?
BFD is a library from the GNU project for manipulating ELF object code files, among other formats.
(OTE: off-topic excursion, PWB)
(PWB: posted without bonus)
Can you answer me some GFS questions:
Does the SRPMs run with Kernel 2.6?
Does anybody got the server/client running already? Can you tell me the Distribution/Kernel?
Can I have one subdir on my workstation which is the total amount of all harddiscs of my GFS Machines together? (Or if mirroring is used
only 50% of the harddisc storage).
Does GFS need a master server?
The reason why I ask for is, I want a distributed filesystem to build a set-up for nutch. I am in the testing process actually with OpenAFS on SUSE 9.0 and also would like to test other distributed filesystems.
what exactly does it give you that OpenAFS does not?
Is it primarily that it is more useful for highly parallel computing systems so that the actual nodes can share the actual block devices?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
What's wrong with having a single point of failure in itself? IMO one should ask whether it is acceptable to have a particular thing as a single point of failure or not.
People hype the benefits of centralized management all the time. Not much better than "single point of failure" if you really think about it. One system administrator = "single point of failure", many admins = multiple points of failure.
We're all living in on Planet Earth. The odds of a catastrophic astronomical event in our lifetimes is not negligible.
Dunno how I missed it in preview... http://www.lustre.org
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
If the network block devices are shared between nodes, the only way you can prevent me from mounting them with my laptop is to have a completely separate network for the storage devices. Even so, physical security will be extremely important.
Personally, I don't think that GFS *can* do much about security, nor so I think it is a replacement for AFS. GFS may ONLY be useful for redundant cluster applications, such as the mentioned Oracle 9i RAC or for PVM/MPI stuff.
So for that sort of thing, GFS might be good, but as a scalable, redundant, and secure filesystem, AFS is still the way to go.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
what exactly does it give you that OpenAFS does not?
:-(.
Performance. Simplicity. Adopting AFS is kindof an all-or-nothing proposition - we looked into it, but it would mean retraining a _lot_ of physicists, some of whom make computer geeks look like social geniuses.
Is it primarily that it is more useful for highly parallel computing systems so that the actual nodes can share the actual block devices?
Yes, and it does it relatively elegantly. PVFS, the main alternative, is fundamentally a kludge IMHO and compared to GFS is horrendously brittle (one PVFS participant failing takes down the whole virtual filesystem) However, until such a time as GFS supports MPI-IO "ROMIO", PVFS will be the cluster FS used on our cluster
However, until such a time as GFS supports MPI-IO "ROMIO", PVFS will be the cluster FS used on our cluster :-(.
Sorry, ROMIO is only supported by the Microsoft Joliet extensions, which you will need to port to GFS....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Don't go down that road... Red Hat's contibutions to Linux absolutely dwarf SuSE's to date in no uncertain terms.
But let's just focus on the most recent efforts of both companies. Realistically no distro is going to include Yast, but it's still a very good move since it will allow SuSE ISO images to be distributed without the existing restricitions in the future and I'm thankful to Novell for it. On the other hand, Red Hat buying Sistina for $31 million and setting their arguably only asset GFS free and then working on including it in the Linux kernel proper directly also benefits Novell and other Linux distributors.
"lately has been locking down their Linux offerings"? How about giving some concrete examples. Last time I checked RHEL was 100% open source and available for download, and so is Fedora Core for the home user. SuSE has been cleaning up their act since they got purchased by Novell, but to play them against Red Hat, who has been completely 100% behind open source since day one, as somehow a more free alternative is laughable.
It's like deja vu all over again.
Large majority of todays apps are limited by the i/o of the harddrives. So what's the point in having multiple machines accessing the same drives at almost the same time? Yup, even bigger bottleneck.
:)
Now if the shared storage is a rackfull of ram (flash or dram + batteries), that's something completely different. Then such a shared filesystem can really show its muscles. Of course, if the locking and fencing system can keep up with the demands
Although distributed in a limited sense, it's better defined as a fault-tolerant cluster file system.
It sounds like a SAN pretends to be a single large block device. (i.e. a disk)
When I manipulate a sector on the disk, the SAN is actually manipulating the same sector on multiple identical drives. So from this standpoint, it sounds similar to RAID, except for the redundant power supplies.
From the description, it sounds like SAN has another important difference from RAID. The SAN, redundant power supplies, redundant drives, and all, is a separate system from the computer. Unlike RAID, which pretends to be a single block device, the SAN can be accessed by multiple CPU's. (Therefore, you don't want to put an ordinary filesystem onto it, such as Ext3.) Therefore the design of GFS, which allows multiple cpu's to concurrently manipulate the filesystem.
Do I fundamentally misunderstand?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I'm really liking your posts today, It's refreshing to see the B.S. confronted.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Red Hat GFS has no single-point-of-failure: any server, network, or storage component can be made redundant to allow continued operations despite failures
Sounds like one of them thingies I should be installing on my comp at home. Oh wait.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Would it kill the editors to include one sentence describing what something is to those of us who don't know? I mean I'm guessing it's a file system, but, bleh.
Minor annoyance, but still.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This is the obligatory "VMS had this in the 1980's" replies.
GFS looks good and I look forward to trying it. It's too bad that someone hasn't written a global lock manager that GFS and other apps could use. I hate to see duplication of effort.
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
frequently I have NO IDEA what an acronym is or what the article is about. The topic heading it's posted under will give me a clue though, along with the summary and whether or not to pusue it more. Exactly like what happened with this article. If redhat relewases some new big deal, it's news usually. If it's *new* news, then I am doubly interested, as they got some medium good cred. I didn't know what a GFS was. Now I do, I learned something. I don't run a cluster but someday I might. And it's precisely because I didn't know what it was that I even looked.
Now in a manual or howto, nope, I want full words, me hates acronyms there.
And I like slashdot because you get an immediate "rest of the story" and good links from knowledgeable people, on all the sides of an issue being discussed. Saves a lot of googling. It's not perfect, but it's quite useful, and I've learned to just skim over the funny stuff and trolls, but even then sometimes you can catch some gems.
I garden. Harvesting is the most rewarding aspect to it, but dealing with the weeds and whatnot takes the most effort and requires the most knowledge and skills. You need to learn to identify the weeds and how to do this or that and admining the garden before you get to the harvesting part. If all you ever were exposed to is the harvesting part, you would never know what the totality of DIY food entails. If a gardening weblog only ever talked in the simplest terms about harvesting food, the people reading there would never understand the background or get the lingo down. Giving them a teaser will get them motivated to do more,learn more, advance.
I guess it's a balance you have to walk between too much technical info all condensed together and too little, if you want to hit a broad audience. the specialists in x-discipline will probably consider it too general and mundane, the uninitiated would conisder it too technical, but really, sticking in the middle to get to the largest numbers of people is the only way left out of those three choices that will get the job done in any reasonable fashion..
Have you ever compared the sources that SuSe publishes with the standard sources? Suse makes TONS of changes, and submits the changes (not sure how hard they fight for inclusion).
Don't make little of SuSe's contributions. They really get into the code.
Large majority of todays apps are limited by the i/o of the harddrives. So what's the point in having multiple machines accessing the same drives at almost the same time?
...
:)
...
...
High availablity of the data on such "hard drives"
Now if the shared storage is a rackfull of ram (flash or dram + batteries), that's something completely different.
In general (up to now), this is the case for most people considering paying for support on GFS
Then such a shared filesystem can really show its muscles. Of course, if the locking and fencing system can keep up with the demands
A fibre-attached storage array (such as those from EMC, HP etc) do
I was involved in migrating a large (ISP) mailstore from a RAID 10'd 28*73GB 15k U160 SCSI-attached storage array to an EMC. Write performance (using the same hardware on the server doing the writes) improved over 4 fold
They bought Spinnaker Networks a few months back, which has a sorta AFS-based filesystem 'in a box' and serves that up over NFS and CIFS. They do kerberized NFS, kerberized CIFS, and also rumored to have a small Linux client that can be loaded to do kerberos authenticated NFS mounts with standard NFSv3.
This SpinFS filesystem allows you to move data from server to server without taking access away (all done online over a copper gigabit network interconnect), mirror data, etc.
Very slick. They are going to be migrating all DataONTAP (standard NetApp filer OS) over to SpinOS over the next few years.
Over on Linuxdevices there's a intresting article on ATA over Ethernet which a startup, called CoRaid has made a protocol for as well as, developed affordable hardware and submitted a driver to be included in linux. ;-)
This is poor mans SAN - the future looks bright for storage geeks
There is also OpenGFS http://opengfs.sourceforge.net/ and Oracle Cluster File System http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs/
These may go away since their major reason for existing was that Sistina had closed up source for GFS.
Thanks RedHat. With LVM2, GFS, my EMC SAN and my cluster of Gentoo boxes (ya, sorry 'bout that part) I'm going to have lots of fun.
... but good luck getting Debian people to swallow their pride and incorporate it into Stable/Unstable/Testing.
Debian must be one of the purest distros out there, but do they have to be so darn elitist?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Finally I can get a shared /home for my linux terminal servers. This is good since I can finally move from high availability clustering to full on
active / active clustering.
Thank you RedHat!
Got Code?
Sorry to follow up with my own comment, but now that I think about it IBM's GPFS uses IP inside a SP cluster to do the same thing. I'm not sure if this is masterless or not. I'm pretty sure it does use their DLM, but may require a master node to handle the IO to the hard drive.
IBM has a Linux version of GPFS now. So they've moved the filesystem out of the SP cluster.
IBM has a new filesystem called Storage Tank that lets the clients directly access the remote hard drive. I'm note sure it's truely masterless though since the master "hard drive" is actually a computer that may handle logic beyond normal SAN logic. For example, I can't run Storage Tank on a Firewire hard drive shared between Linux boxes.
Could someone confirm my example???
You can't use GFS in a computational cluster. I've tried. It's not pretty. It wasn't designed for scientific applications.
Your post is 90% on the money, but for a computational cluster, please use a real parallel file system (one example is PVFS2
Can anyone compare Lustre and GFS as far as their archatecture goes?
They're both GPL, but Lustre only releases their previous stable release under the GPL license, so there's not much chance of an OSS community forming around it since the development isn't open, only the old code.
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
I am too lazy to check myelf, so I'll ask the collective : does GFS support locking and mmap() ? I am asking because this is a sine qua non condition to run my favorite mail server, Cyrus imapd. Redundant high-availability servers are one of the most asked for scenario. And no, Cyrus Murder don't cut it (it solve a different problem, that is scalability).
:wq
I have been following GFS for a while now and have been waiting for it to come out. As an oracle DBA working with 9i RAC I can tell you that RAW or OCFS partitions suck and are overly hard to manage. Not to mention to various bugs that come with OCFS (the unable to remove directory bug anyone???)
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
Less is more! People hate having inconsistent view of their files when they're working across machines in a lab enviornment or in a cluster. Things like GFS are godsends because they reduce IT's need to be invovled. Set it up once, and go.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Both GFS and Lustre (since it was mentioned earlier) support mmap. Note that the syscall semantics might be slightly different (I don't know the details). So give it a shot.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I'm about to buy a large central NFS fileserver for my office. While GFS won't be in place for me earlier enough to stop that purchase, I'm thinking the a GFS-like product would be a huge boon for offices if:
You can make all those crappy PC hard drives look like one big, redundant, reliable, non-slow (fast is too much to hope for), network drive.
Imagine -- you get rid of Microsoft and stop paying licensing and, at the same time, get company-wide access to a massive filesystem which can take multiple failures without loosing data. One which uses all those 50-200 gig hard drives in each of those PCs which are already sunk costs. (I've got 10s of terabytes, distributed among those desktops.)
That would be Coporate Nirvana.
But would GFS do that, or would that require a differnet file system -- has this been done?
I am not a lawyer. Please do not use this as legal advice.