Best distributed filesystem for commodity linux storage farm [closed]

Question

I have a lot of spare intel linux servers laying around (hundreds) and want to use them for a distributed file system in a web hosting and file sharing environment. This isn't for a HPC application, so high performance isn't critical. The main requirement is high availability, if one server goes offline, the data stored on it's hard drives is still available from other nodes. It must run over TCP/IP and provide standard POSIX file permissions.

I've looked at the following:

• Lustre (http://wiki.lustre.org/index.php?title=Main_Page): Comes really close, but it doesn't provide redundancy for data on a node. You must make the data HA using RAID or DRBD. Supported by Sun and Open Source, so it should be around for a while

• gfarm (http://datafarm.apgrid.org/): Looks like it provides the redundancy but at the cost of complexity and maintainability. Not as well supported as Lustre.

Does anyone have any experience with these or any other systems that might work?

Answer 1

check also GlusterFS

Edit (Aug-2012): Ceph is finally getting ready. Recently the authors formed Inktank, an independent company to sell commercial support for it. According to some presentaions, the mountable POSIX-compliant filesystem is the uppermost layer and not really tested yet, but the lower layers are being used in production for some time now.

The interesting part is the RADOS layer, which presents an object-based storage with both a 'native' access via the librados library (available for several languages) and an Amazon S3-compatible RESP API. Either one makes it more than adequate for adding massive storage to a web service.

This video is a good description of the philosophy, architecture, capabilities and current status.

Answer 2

In my opinion, the best file system for Linux is MooseFS , it's quite new, but I had an opportunity to compare it with Ceph and Lustre and I say for sure that MooseFS is the best one.

Answer 3

Gluster is getting quite a lot of press at the moment:

http://www.gluster.org/

Answer 4

If not someone forces you to use it, I would also highly recommend using anything else than Lustre. From what I hear from others and what also gave myself nightmares for quite some time is the fact that Lustre quite easily breaks down in all kinds of situations. And if only a single client in the system breaks down, it puts itself into an endless do_nothing_loop mode typically while holding some important global lock - so the next time another client tries to access the same information, it will also hang. Thus, you often end up rebooting the whole cluster, which I guess is something you would try to avoid normally ;)

Modern parallel file systems like FhGFS (http://www.fhgfs.com) are way more robust here and also allow you to do nice things like running server and client components on the same machines (though built-in HA features are still under development, as someone from their team told me, but their implementation is going to be pretty awesome from what I've heard).

Answer 5

Lustre has been working for us. It's not perfect but it's the only thing we have tried that has not broken down over load. We still get LBUGS from time to time and dealing with 100TB + file systems is never easy but the Lustre system has worked and increased both performance and availability.

Answer 6

Ceph looks to be a promising new-ish entry into the arena. The site claims it's not ready for production use yet though.

Answer 7

I read a lot about distributed filesystems and I think FhGFS is the best.

http://www.fhgfs.com/

It worth a try. See more about it at:

http://www.fhgfs.com/wiki/