On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 1:35 PM, Kaiting Chen <kaitocracy@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 2:50 PM, Thomas S Hatch <thatch45@gmail.com> wrote:
The difference is that Gluster is a nightmare!
The problem with gluster is that the replication is tiered, and that there is no metadata. The client is then the master, this means that if you connect to gluster with a mis-configured client you can have large scale data corruption.
Next since the replication of data is tiered you don't have true replication, so only the gluster server you connect to to save the data has the correct data, if that server goes down the replications are old and you have data corruption.
The gluster devs actually had to recall gluster 3.1 because the data corruption was rampant.
The difference between gluster and MooseFS is that MooseFS works!
MooseFS also has a cool web frontend :)
We were using gluster and the business cost became catastrophic, picking up the peices was a nightmare.
MooseFS saves data to replication nodes in paralell! MooseFS maintains a master metalogger so client connections are agnostic. MooseFS maintains metadata replication so you can restore is something happens to the master.
I take it you don't like FUSE? EVERYBODY is doing it ;)
I am looking forward to Ceph, which does not require fuse, but I don't think it is going to be production ready for at least a year, and MooseFS easily compete with Ceph IMHO.
If there are GlusterFS devs in the room, please disregard the previous rant :)
Thanks for the very thorough answer. And yes I hate the idea of a filesystem in userspace. Everyone knows the FS's should be in kernel space! Mostly it's the fact that in my opinion bypassing the kernel's caching mechanism is entirely impractical for a high performance FS. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyways your application looks really good. Good luck! --Kaiting.
-- Kiwis and Limes: http://kaitocracy.blogspot.com/
Thanks Kaiting! I was looking back at my post and worrying that it was too much of a rant :) I spend a month full time testing and trying distributed filesystems and my conclusion was that MooseFS is the best one out there. I agree that fuse is something that should be used with caution, and that a filesystem does belong in kernel space. But in the situation of a distributed filesystem I thought that the benefits of fuse in allowing for higher flexibility made it a permissible option. All in all I think that fuse for network filesystems can be a huge advantage, on the other hand I am much more cautious about local filesystems that operate behind fuse. So to sum it up, I feel good with moosefs, sshfs, but am cautious when looking at things like zfs-fuse. But with that said, I don't believe in disparaging someone's project on the grounds of what it is, the fact that people are creating new things and sharing them is a wonderful thing! On the other hand, I will speak my mind when someone's project corrupts my data :)