Gluster File System

Introducing Gluster Filesystem

GlusterFS is an open source, clustered file system capable of scaling to several petabytes and handling thousands of clients. GlusterFS clusters together storage building blocks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect, aggregating disk and memory resources and managing data in a single global namespace. GlusterFS is based on a stackable user space design and can deliver exceptional performance for diverse workloads.

Virtualized Cloud Environments

GlusterFS Architecture Design Goals

● Elasticity ● Flexibility adapt to growth/reduction

● Add, delete volumes & users

● Without disruption

● Scale linearly ● Multiple dimensions

● Performance

● Capacity

● Aggregated resources

● Innovation ● Eliminate metadata

● Dramatically improve performance

● Unify files and objects

Capacity

Advantages to GlusterFS • Innovation – It eliminates the metadata and can dramtically

improve the performance which will help us to unify data and objects.

• Elasticity – Adapted to growth and reduction of size of the data.

• Scale Linearly – It has availability to petabytes and beyond.

• Simplicity – It is easy to manage and independent from kernel while running in user space.

What makes Gluster outstanding among other distributed file systems?

• Scalable – Absence of a metadata server provides a faster file system.

• Affordable – It deploys on commodity hardware.

• Flexible – As I said earlier, GlusterFS is a software only file system. Here data is stored on native file systems like ext4, xfs etc.

• Open Source – Currently GlusterFS is maintained by Red Hat Inc, a billion dollar open source company, as part of Red Hat Storage.

GlusterFS concepts – Trusted Storage Pool Trusted Storage Pool (cluster) is a collection of storage

servers.

Trusted Storage Pool is formed by invitation – you “probe” a new member from the cluster and not vice-versa.

Logical partition for all data and management operations.

Members can be dynamically added and removed from the pool.

GlusterFS concepts – Trusted Storage Pool

GlusterFS concepts – Trusted Storage Pool

Trusted Storage Pool

• A brick is the combination of a node and an export directory –

for e.g. hostname:/dir

• Each brick inherits limits of the underlying filesystem

• No limit on the number bricks per node

• Ideally, each brick in a cluster should be of the same size

/export3 /export3 /export3

Storage Node

/export1

Storage Node

/export2

/export1

/export2

/export4

/export5

Storage Node

/export1

/export2

3 bricks 5 bricks 3 bricks

GlusterFS concepts – Bricks

GlusterFS concepts - Volumes

• A volume is a logical collection of bricks.

• Volume is identified by an administrator provided name.

Volume is a mountable entity and the volume name is

provided at the time of mounting.

• mount -t glusterfs server1:/<volname> /my/mnt/point ➢ Bricks from the

same node can be part of different volumes

GlusterFS concepts - Volumes

/export/brick1

/export/brick2

/export/brick1

/export/brick2

/export/brick1

/export/brick2

music

Videos

Node1 Node3 Node2

Volume Types

• Type of a volume is specified at the time of volume creation

• Volume type determines how and where data is placed

• Following volume types are supported in glusterfs:

• Distribute • Stripe • Replication • Distributed Replicate • Striped Replicate

Access Mechanisms

Gluster volumes can be accessed via the following

mechanisms:

• FUSE

• NFS

• SMB

• libgfapi

• ReST

• HDFS