Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Highly Available Storage Solutions?
Gunfighter asks: "I run a small data center for one of my customers, but they're constantly filling up different hard drives on different servers and then shuffling the data back and forth. At their current level of business, they can't afford to invest in a Storage Area Network of any sort, so they want to spread the load of their data storage needs across their existing servers, like Google does. The only software packages I've found that do this seamlessly are Lustre and NFS. The problem with Lustre is that it has a single metadata server unless you configure fail-over, and NFS isn't redundant at all and can be a nightmare to manage. The only thing I've found that even comes close is Starfish. While it looks promising, I'm wondering if anyone else has found a reliable solution that is as easy to set up and manage? Eventually, they would like to be able to scale from their current storage usage levels (~2TB) to several hundred terabytes once the operation goes into full production."
When you're talking HA, you're always talking "big money". If you want a fully redundant infrastructure, you might have to start using commercial operating systems (like Novell Linux, RedHat, or even other Unix-based commercial OS like Solaris or AIX). The problem here is support. Full HA environments are incredibly complex, and you will need to make very, very sure that everything works well.
I wrongly implemented HA system will have less uptime than a 499US$ Dell with a single ATA drive.
Entry level SANs using iSCSI are available at quite affordable prices. Look at HPs and IBMs (e.G. the DS300). Even the entry models allow you to use MPIO.
Before you go about deciding what file system you need, you need to spend some time thinking about what kinds of files your customers are storing. RDBMS data? Large graphics/audio/video files that rarely if ever change? Scanned documents? Large numbers of small files? Small numbers of large files? You get the idea.
Then you can start looking at solutions. 'Optimal File System' can mean many things to many people, and everyone here is going to have a different viewpoint. You need to decide what features of a file system makes it optimal for you. Then you can go looking for a solution.
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
GlusterFS (www.gluster.org) is just "THE" best cluster filesystem I have ever studied. I'm testing a few of them for a project here at my job and, at least for my case, GlusterFS is the best. It can scale to the petabytes with as many servers as you want. It can also use InfiniBand as interconnect protocol besides the usual TCP/IP/Ethernet.
It's design is simple is smart. Every feature is a translator that interconnects to other translators. So, you may organize your filesystem they way *you* want it.
Let-me give-you an example: they have 2 translators: 'unify' to unifying harddrives as one and 'afr' for automaticly file replication. Depeding on the order you use it you have two completly different setups. You can have two cluters replicating eachother or you can have a cluster of replicating servers pair.
Beside it's features and design, it's development team is *very* friendly. Yesterday someone (user) asked for a feature in the devel list, a get answered saying: good ideia, i'll do it.
Very good software.
Take a look: http://www.gluster.org/glusterfs.php