Please share your experiences with "open source" storage

anomie · 06-28-2012, 03:09 PM

For those willing to share details, I'd be very interested to read about your experiences (successes, failures, and opinions about production-worthiness) with "open source" storage. What I mean by "open source" storage in this context is a mature software implementation of high-availability, reliable block level (with cluster awareness) or NAS storage that can run on commodity servers.

Especially interested in your experiences with either GlusterFS or Lustre.

Thanks for your time.

kbp · 06-28-2012, 03:35 PM

I've tried OpenFiler in the past and didn't have any major issues, but if you're interested in glusterfs you may have noticed the recent release of Red Hat Storage 2.0, it's probably a little more enterprise ready now.

anomie · 06-28-2012, 04:02 PM

Thanks for the OpenFiler lead. May I ask how you were using it (as SAN or NAS device?), and approximately what level of volume you were reading/writing to it?

kbp · 06-28-2012, 04:42 PM

We used them as NAS backing for a dev VMware ESX cluster, we didn't have any budget for storage so recycling a couple of servers was the work around. They ran pretty well considering, they were stock standard 2u's with 6x146GB U320's. Again from memory, I think we had roughly 50 vm's but I can't remember any of the i/o figures.

Pearlseattle · 07-19-2012, 07:45 AM

Hi
Using since ~2 years GlusterFS to share directories in a NFS-like way. Very happy with it.
Be aware that I really only use the server/client architecture of GlusterFS to make the stuff available to other hosts - I still use a normal software-raid to manage the HDDs, distribute the data, etc... .
Wrote this to describe how I set up things.

Cheers

anomie · 07-19-2012, 11:22 AM

Thanks for the note. (Looks like your GlusterFS deployment is a home project, right?)

Pearlseattle · 07-19-2012, 02:21 PM

Yes, just a home project.
To use it in a company I would probably first drop an email to the people that are working on it to ask what their plans for the future are - I think that there were a lot of changes to GlusterFS during the last years and it would be good to clarify what the future plans are and how the acquisition by RedHat will influence them.