Here is another interesting video from Linuxconf Japan 2012, below Dustin Black provides an overview of Gluster from a system administrator’s point of view.
The topics covered in this 1 hour presentation include:
Recently I started to revisit the idea of using zfs and linux (zfsonlinux) as the basis for a server that will eventually be the foundation of our gluster storage infrastructure. Â At this point we are using the Opensolaris version of zfs and an older (but stable) version of gluster (3.0.5).
The problem with staying with Opensolaris (besides the fact that it is no longer being actively supported itself),  is that we would be unable to upgrade gluster….and thus we would be unable to take advantage of some of the new and upcoming features that exist in the later versions (such as geo-replication, snapshots, active-active geo-replication and various other bugfixes, performance enhancements, etc).
Hardware:
Here are the specs for the current hardware I am using to test:
ZFS installation:
I decided to use Ubuntu 11.10 for this round of testing, currently the daliy ppa has a lot of bugfixes and performance improvements that do not exist in the latest stable release ( 0.6.0-rc6) so the daily ppa is the version that should be used until either v0.6.0-rc7 or v0.6.0 final are released.
Here is what you will need to get zfs installed and running:
At this point we can create our first zpool. Here is the syntax used to create a 6 disk raidz2 vdev:
Now let’s check the status of the zpool:
ZFS Benchmarks:
I ran a few tests to see what kind of performance I could expect out of zfs first, before I added gluster on top, that way I would have better idea about where the bottleneck (if any) existed.
linux 3.3-rc5 kernel untar:
dd using block size of 4096:
dd using block size of 1M:
Gluster + ZFS Benchmarks
Next I added gluster (version 3.2.5) to the mix to see how they performed together:
linux 3.3-rc5 kernel untar:
dd using block size of 4096:
dd using block size of 1M:
Conclusion
Well so far so good, I have been running the zfsonlinux port for two weeks now without any real issues. From what I understand there is still a decent amount of work left to do around dedup and compression (neither of which IÂ necessarily require for this particular setup).
The good news is that the zfsonlinux developers have not even really started looking into improving performance at this point, since their main focus thus far has been overall stability.
A good deal of development is also taking place in order to allow linux to boot using a zfs ‘/boot’ partition. Â This is currently an option on several disto’s including Ubuntu and Gentoo, however the setup requires a fair amount of effort to get going, so it will be nice when this style setup is supported out of the box.
In terms of Gluster specifically, it performs quite well using geo-replication with larger file sizes. I am really looking forward to the active-active geo-replication feature currently planned for v3.4 to become fully implemented and available. Our current production setup (currently using two node replication) has a T3 (WAN) interconnect, so having the option to use geo-replication in the future should really speed up our write throughput, which is currently hampered by the throughput of the T3 itself.
Now that RedHat has purchased Gluster, and they are in the process of releasing their storage software appliance, many people are wondering what all this means for the GlusterFS project and gluster.org as a whole.
John Mark Walker conducted a webinar last week entitled ‘The Future of GlusterFS and Gluser.org’. In the beginning of this presentation John talks about the history behind, and origins of the Gluster project, he then goes into a basic overview of the features provided by GlusterFS, and finally he talks about what to expect from version 3.3 of GlusterFS and the GlusterFS open source community going forward.
Here are some of the talking points that were discussed during the webinar:
Here is the link to the entire presentation in a downloadable .mp4 format.
Here is a link to all the slides that were presented during the talk.
Redhat released a statement today in which they announced their plans to acquire Gluster, the company behind the open source scalable filesystem GlusterFS.
Only time will tell exactly what this means for the project, community, etc, but based on the fact that Redhat has a fairly good track record with the open source community, and given the statements they made in their FAQ, I can only assume that we will continue to see GlusterFS grow and mature into a tool that extends reliably into the enterprise environment.
Gluster also provided several statements via their website today as well, you can read a statement from the founders here, as well as an additional Gluster press release here.