Hi Hassan. Answers inline below. James Burnash, Unix Engineering T. 201-239-2248 jburnash at knight.com | www.knight.com [cid:image001.jpg at 01CC0FB7.A78A6B00] 545 Washington Ave. | Jersey City, NJ From: gluster-users-bounces at gluster.org [mailto:gluster-users-bounces at gluster.org] On Behalf Of Nyamul Hassan Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2011 8:36 AM To: gluster-users at gluster.org Subject: [SPAM?] Storage Design Overview Importance: Low Hi, We are building a storage cluster with high availability and high scalability in mind, and GlusterFS project seems very interesting for our purposes. We do have some basic questions before we get down and dirty, and would be grateful if someone could shed some light on this. 1. Can we mount a GlusterFS on a client and expect it to provide sustained throughput near wirespeed? <No> 2. Is there any subjective comparison between reading from GlusterFS and reading from local drives? <A number of instances on the mailing list. Not sure if these exist on a web page or the wiki at this point. Perhaps I?ll do that when I get some free time.> 3. Does it put extra pressure on the client? <What do you mean by pressure? My clients (HP ProLiant DL360 G5 Quad Core with 32GB RAM) show up to 2GB of memory usage when the native Gluster client is used for mounts ? but that is dependent on what you set the client cache max for ? in my case, 2GB. CPU utilization is usually negligible in my systems, network bandwidth utilization and I/O throughput ? depend on what the files sizes and access patterns look like> 2. Reliability + Scalability means Distributed Replicated volumes. Initially this might be enough for our needs, but as our read requirements grow, the Striped option looks promising. Is it possible to mix Distributed + Replicated + Striped? <I don?t believe that this configuration is currently supported> 3. What happens to very large files. Say 100 GB files. Are they kept as a single file in every node that has the file? Or is it split up and distributed in blocks? <Storage is as single file on the appropriate nodes per your volume configuration. The exception to this is Striped, which I believe still stores the pieces of the striped file as actual files on the nodes. That's it for now. I hope these were not too elementary to ask in this list. And, thank you beforehand for your time and effort in replying to my email. Regards HASSAN DISCLAIMER: This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s)named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this in error, please immediately notify me and permanently delete the original and any printout thereof. E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message which arise as a result of e-mail transmission. NOTICE REGARDING PRIVACY AND CONFIDENTIALITY Knight Capital Group may, at its discretion, monitor and review the content of all e-mail communications. http://www.knight.com<http://www.knight.com/> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/attachments/20110511/e4558d42/attachment-0001.htm> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 5063 bytes Desc: image001.jpg URL: <http://gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/attachments/20110511/e4558d42/attachment-0001.jpg>