Anthony, Gluster can take the smaller ( 6TB ) volumes and aggregate them into a large Gluster volume ( as seen from the clients ). So that takes care of managebility on the client side of things. On the server side, once you make those smaller 6 TB volumes, you will depend on RAID to rebuild the disk behind it, so its good to have a smaller partition. Since you are using RAID and not Gluster replication, it might just make sense to have smaller RAID partitions. If instead you were using Gluster replication and resulting recovery, it would happen at first access of the file and the size of the Gluster volume or the backend native FS volume or the RAID ( or raw ) partition behind it would not be much of a consideration. Regards, Tejas. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Anthony Goddard" <agoddard at mbl.edu> To: gluster-users at gluster.org Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 3:24:35 AM GMT +05:30 Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi Subject: volume sizes First post! We're looking at setting up 6x 24 bay storage servers (36TB of JBOD storage per node) and running glusterFS over this cluster. We have RAID cards on these boxes and are trying to decide what the best size of each volume should be, for example if we present the OS's (and gluster) with six 36TB volumes, I imagine rebuilding one node would take a long time, and there may be other performance implications of this. On the other hand, if we present gluster / the OS's with 6x 6TB volumes on each node, we might have more trouble in managing a larger number of volumes. My gut tells me a lot of small (if you can call 6TB small) volumes will be lower risk and offer faster rebuilds from a failure, though I don't know what the pros and cons of these two approaches might be. Any advice would be much appreciated! Cheers, Anthony _______________________________________________ Gluster-users mailing list Gluster-users at gluster.org http://gluster.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gluster-users
