Monthly Archives: October 2010

Gluster 3.1 released

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Today the team over at Gluster.com announced the availability of version of Gluster 3.1 of their software.   There are currently two different offerings available from Gluster.  There is the Gluster Storage Platform, known as ‘GlusterSP’ which provides a Linux based bare metal installer, web based front end, etc.

They also offer ‘Glusterfs’ which they release as open source and provides the same functionality of GlusterSP,  but does not require a fresh install like GlusterSP,  but instead,  you can use it on an existing Linux or Solaris based system.

The 3.1 release brings the following new features:

Elastic Volume Management: logical storage volumes are decoupled from physical hardware, allowing administrators to grow, shrink and migrate storage volumes without any application downtime. As storage is added, storage volumes are automatically rebalanced across the cluster making it always available online regardless of changes to the underlying hardware.

New Gluster Console Manager: the Command Line Interface (CLI), Application Programming Interface (API) and shell are merged into a single powerful interface, enabling automation by giving the CLI higher level API’s and scripting capabilities. Languages such as Python, Ruby or PHP can be used to script a series of commands that are invoked through the command line. This new tool requires no new APIs and is able to script out and rapidly automate any information inserted in the CLI allowing cloud administrators the ability to simply automate large scale operations.

Native Network File System (NFS): including a native NFS v3 module which allows storage servers to communicate natively with NFS clients directly to any storage server in the cluster and simultaneously communicates NFS and the Gluster protocol. NFS requires no specialized training, making it simple and easy to deploy.

To find out more about Gluster you can visit Gluster.com, you can also visit Gluster.org if you want to get more familiar with the open source side of the Gluster house.

Ext4 vs Zfs Kernel Module:benchmarks so far.

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Well I have finally set aside some time to try and test performance using the zfs kernel module that I blogged about a bit ago.

Overall the zfs kernel module produced results that were similar to the ones I saw while using ext4, however most real world zfs setups are not limited to a single disk, so it will be very interesting to see what kind of performance numbers we will see when we start benchmarking on setups that have many disks.

Although the zfs results were slower in almost every single case, ext4 was not too much faster in most of those cases and I suspect that there are lots of people out there who would be more then willing to take a tiny hit in speed, in order to gain the substantial benefits that comes with having zfs as your underlying filesystem.

Here are some of the benchmarks I got doing the following:

a)create 10,000 files using touch
b)create 10,000 directories using mkdir
c)untar the latest stable linux kernel
d)create a 1GB file using dd
e)find 10,000 files
f)delete 10,000 files
g)find 10,000 directories
h)delete 10,000 directories

At some point soon I plan to add values for raid2z, btrfs, iozone results, etc.

[easychart type=”vertbar” height=”10″ width=”10″ title=”Various File Operations in Seconds” groupnames=”Ext4,Zfs,Zfs-mirror” valuenames=”Touch x 10000,Mkdir x 10000,Untar kernel,Create 1 GB file” group1values=”12.669,14.276,4.997,1.110″ group2values=”13.009,13.015,6.577,6.084″ group3values=”13.044,13.352,9.787,12.208″] [easychart type=”vertbar” height=”10″ width=”10″ title=”Various File Operations in Seconds” groupnames=”Ext4,Zfs,Zfs-mirror” valuenames=”Delete files,Find files,Delete directories,Find directories” group1values=”0.122,0.036,0.163,0.295″ group2values=”0.577,0.096,0.247,0.764″ group3values=”0.526,0.141,0.261,0.690″ ]