Installing and managing thedistributed GlusterFS filesystem

Flexible Storage

Article from ADMIN 08/2012

By Tim Sch¸rmann

Sure, you could pay for cloud services, but with GlusterFS, you can take the idle space in your own data center and create a large data warehouse quickly and easily.

GlusterFS combines the unused storage space on multiple servers to create a single, large, virtual drive that you can mount like a legacy filesystem – using NFS or FUSE on a client PC. And, you can add more servers or remove existing servers from the storage pool on the fly. GlusterFS works kind of like "RAID on the network," and if you look closely, you will discover many RAID concepts during setup.

GlusterFS really comes into its own when you need to store huge quantities of data, have redundant file storage, or write data very quickly for later access. GlusterFS can juggle multiple petabytes easily, and it's easy to install and manage.

Theoretically, data throughput increases with each server you add, although the network connection also imposes limits. GlusterFS can use both TCP/IP connections and InfiniBand RDMA. Whether just one or several thousand clients are attached to the wire at the same time makes no difference.

GlusterFS is equally well suited for small or large networks, and it will distribute your payload and metadata across all your servers in an intelligent way, thus making it error tolerant and highly available.

Thrifty Old-Timer

GlusterFS itself goes back a couple of years: Development started in 2005 with Gluster Inc. At that time, the developers placed the source code under the GNU GPL and mainly earned money on commercial support.

At the end of 2011, Red Hat acquired the distributed filesystem for several million US dollars and thus pushed it into the limelight [1]. Initially, the sales model didn't change. The current GlusterFS versions, on the basis of which Red Hat has compiled some of its commercial products in its cloud computing division, are licensed under the GPL v3.

To show how fast and easy it is to set up GlusterFS, I'll use a simple example. On a small network with

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