1.3 is starting to look pretty solid to me, and I'll be strongly urging
our big cluster folks here (as well as our campus in general) to try it
out. GlusterFS is an amazingly flexible and simple/easy piece of software,
and it already deserves a great deal of attention from the community.
Word needs to spread, and hardly anyone has heard of it. Frankly, I hope
it becomes the de facto standard for networked/distributed filesystems in
general, not just for HPC clusters.
I will be considering a full department deployment of GlusterFS with
version 1.4 (with its self-healing so we can do fully automated
fault-tolerance), although even 1.3 is tempting and a major improvement
over our existing system. We'll be drooling over the TLS, quotas,
snapshots, and ACLs in 1.5, and the dynamic reconfiguration in 1.6 will
give us long-term peace-of-mind (we'll be able to add and remove nodes and
disks whenever we need to without disrupting our users, every sysadmin's
dream).
The encryption support in 1.8 may also be rather appealing, although we
care most about encryption over-the-wire and not as much about encryption
on disk; perhaps that will be provided with the TLS support in 1.5. On a
related note, has anyone suggested GSSAPI support? This would provide
over-the-wire encryption as well as user-level rather than node-level
shares.
Many, many thanks! GlusterFS is already a dream come true (and getting
more so on an almost daily basis)!
Brent Nelson
Director of Computing
Dept. of Physics
University of Florida
