GlusterFS
| Developer(s) | Red Hat, Inc. |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 3.2.5 / 17 November 2011 |
| Operating system | Linux, Mac OS X, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris |
| Type | Distributed file system |
| License | GNU General Public License v3 |
| Website | www.gluster.org |
GlusterFS is a scale-out NAS file system developed by Red Hat. It aggregates various storage servers over Ethernet or Infiniband RDMA interconnect into one large parallel network file system. GlusterFS is based on a stackable user space design without compromising performance. It has found a variety of applications including cloud computing, biomedical sciences and archival storage. GlusterFS is free software, licensed under GNU GPL v3 license.
Red Hat, Inc. is the primary commercial sponsor of GlusterFS, and offers both commercial products and support for GlusterFS-based solutions.
GlusterFS was developed by Gluster, Inc., which was acquired by Red Hat, Inc. [1] on 7 October 2011.
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[edit] Design
GlusterFS has a client and server component. Servers are typically deployed as storage bricks, with each server running a glusterfsd daemon to export a local file system as a volume. The glusterfs client process, which connects to servers with a custom protocol over TCP/IP, InfiniBand or SDP, composes composite virtual volumes from multiple remote servers using stackable translators. By default, files are stored whole, but striping of files across multiple remote volumes is also supported. The final volume may then be mounted by the client host through the FUSE mechanism or accessed via libglusterfs client library without incurring FUSE filesystem overhead.
Most of the functionality of GlusterFS is implemented as translators, including:
- File-based mirroring and replication
- File-based striping
- File-based load balancing
- Volume failover
- scheduling and disk caching
- Storage quotas
The GlusterFS server is kept minimally simple: it exports an existing file system as-is, leaving it up to client-side translators to structure the store. The clients themselves are stateless, do not communicate with each other, and are expected to have translator configurations consistent with each other. GlusterFS relies on an elastic hashing algorithm, rather than using either a centralized or distributed metadata model. With version 3.1 and later of GlusterFS, volumes can be added, deleted, or migrated dynamically, helping to avoid coherency problems, and allowing GlusterFS to scale up to several petabytes on commodity hardware by avoiding bottlenecks that normally affect more tightly-coupled distributed file systems.
[edit] Academic references
GlusterFS has been used as the foundation for several pieces of academic research[2][3] and one survey article.[4]
[edit] See also
- Distributed file system
- List of file systems, the distributed parallel fault-tolerant file system section
- Ceph
- Fraunhofer Parallel File System (FhGFS)
- MooseFS
[edit] External links
[edit] Notes
- ^ http://www.redhat.com/promo/storage/
- ^ Noronha, Ranjit; Panda, Dhabaleswar K (9–12 September 2008). ""IMCa: A High Performance Caching Front-End for GlusterFS on InfiniBand". 37th International Conference on Parallel Processing, 2008. ICPP '08.. IEEE. doi:10.1109/ICPP.2008.84. http://nowlab.cse.ohio-state.edu/publications/conf-papers/2008/noronha-icpp08.pdf. Retrieved 14 June 2011.
- ^ Kwidama, Sevickson (2007-2008), Streaming and storing CineGrid data: A study on optimization methods, University of Amsterdam System and Network Engineering, http://www.science.uva.nl/~delaat/sne-2007-2008/p04/report.pdf, retrieved 14 June 2011
- ^ Klaver, Jeroen; van der Jagt, Roel (14 July 2010), Distributed file system on the SURFnet network Report, University of Amsterdam System and Network Engineering, http://www.science.uva.nl/%7Edelaat/sne-2009-2010/p32/report.pdf, retrieved 14 June 2011
