Aga wrote:
Hello everybody,
I am using GlusterFS since a few weeks. Surfing the net I stumbled into this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_codes
I am wondering if it would be a good idea to make a xlator for GlusterFS using
this algorithm.
The advantage of this solution is that you can split a file in N size blocks,
and spread them around the bricks. If you lose one brick, you can still
reconstruct files combining the remaining blocks. It's also quite efficient.
Kind regards to everybody and compliments for the great job already done!
I'm not sure how you would extrapolate this to a client/server
architecture, even one where there may be many servers.
It seems optimized for a network where everyone participates in the file
sharing (indeed it was developed for P2P usage), maximizing the
possibility that new nodes get data other nodes are less likely to be
sharing.
I'm not sure how well it would apply to glusterFS, which is
client/server based, as it seems to require P2P type connections. Even
though you CAN run the client and server on the same system in
GlsuterFS, there's a distinction between where data is served from and
where it's mounted to, which isn't usually the case in P2P (indeed, it
can't be the case for this algorithm to work).
Although, maybe GlusterFS is modular enough that there's some real
interesting translators that can be made to work with this in useful
ways. I can't seem to wrap my head around a useful way though.
--
-Kevan Benson
-A-1 Networks
