[Lustre-discuss] Lustre compared to Gluster (Mag Gam)

[Jordan Mendler]

>
> We have been hearing a lot of news recently about "Gluster". Does
> anyone know how it compares to Lustre? Can it do the same things as
> Lustre? It seems it has built in SNS. Anyone know?


We have tried Gluster on several occasions and it was always buggy at scale.
Initially we had about 60TB of medium sized files in a test environment with
about 20 clients, and Gluster flipped out when a node would reboot. Since
there is no Metadata server, it appeared to hang on reindexing everything on
each node on start up. Also lots of weird hangs and things like taking 5
minutes to return an ls. No where near as stable as Lustre, which more or
less just works, with a smaller number of weird issues.

The Gluster company also gave us a lot of mixed signals. They called us once
to offer us free support in helping up set up a reevaluation of GlusterFS.
We spoke to the CEO's and agreed. After spending several hours setting it up
ourselves, they then avoided our support questions saying priority goes to
paying customers. Ultimately they attempted to help us, but with little
success.

They present a nice roadmap and the concept of minimizing complexity is
promising for things like backup systems. Unfortunately they are nowhere
near ready. Hopefully they can stabilize their product in the future because
it would be a good addition to the open-source community.

Jordan
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