Our company has started using glusterfs in a mail cluster that will hopefully soon go into production phase. So I thought I should give some feedback on what I perceive as missing features today. -SCTP support, this might not be a silver bullet but it feels very strange that a cutting edge project such as glusterfs does not support this already. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_layer#Comparison_of_Transport_Layer_protocols Immedeate advantages: -Improved ECC suitable for jumbo frames Features that might need glusterfs code changes: -Multistreaming (Separate stream for metadata and stats f.ex?) -Multihoming (failover when one nic dies) -Unordered delivery -Documentation for how to add new translators and how to change translator options in 3.1/3.2 is a bit poor. I first tried to change the config files manually but failed miserably before I found a description on the mailinglist of what commands to use. -Ability to have the storage nodes autosync themselves. In our setup the normal nodes have 2x1Gbit connections while the storage boxes have 2x10Gbit connections, so having the storage boxes use their own bandwidth and resources to sync would be nice. And I don't really like the "read all files to sync them" way of doing things, it should be possible to do this by communicating only metadata between the servers. Reading many many millions of tiny files could take ages. -An ability for the clients to subscribe to metadata updates for a specific directory would also be nice, so that it can cache that folders stats while working there and still know that it will not miss any changes. This would perhaps increase overhead in large clusters but could improve performance by a lot in clusters where several nodes work in the same folder (mail spool folder for example). Manual static subscriptions would be nice, but automatic temporary subscriptions would also be a nice addition (but still the ability to force specific folders manuelly). Hopefully some of this will seem interesting to others aswell. Sincerely Hans Kristian Rosbach ISPHuset Nordic AS
