[Google Cloud Storage is] great for storing and playing large video files, and even sharing them securely with others, whether or not they are part of your organization. No need to download video files before watching, and can also be used to store any other kinds of files.
GFS is well suited for DEVOPS type environments where organizations prefer to invest in servers and DAS (direct attached storage) versus purchasing storage solutions/appliances. GFS allows organizations to scale their storage capacity at a fraction of the price using DAS HDDs versus committing to purchase licenses and hardware from a dedicated storage manufacturer (e.g. NetApp, Dell/EMC, HP, etc.).
Really great, easy to use interface helps us manage files easily. Storage is fast and inexpensive, so we don't have to spin up storage instances locally
Great set of command-line tools to manage data and storage options via scripts and apps, as well as an SDK means we can build GCS into our orchestration and operations tools
Robust integration with other Google cloud tools means that we don't have to think too hard about using GCS for a variety of storage tasks as we interact with other Google services.
Scales; bricks can be easily added to increase storage capacity
Performs; I/O is spread across multiple spindles (HDDs), thereby increasing read and write performance
Integrates well with RHEL/CentOS 7; if your organization is using RHEL 7, Gluster (GFS) integrates extremely well with that baseline, especially since it's come under the Red Hat portfolio of tools.
Documentation; using readthedocs demonstrates that the Gluster project isn't always kept up-to-date as far as documentation is concerned. Many of the guides are for previous versions of the product and can be cumbersome to follow at times.
Self-healing; our use of GFS required the administrator to trigger an auto-heal operation manually whenever bricks were added/removed from the pool. This would be a great feature to incorporate using autonomous self-healing whenever a brick is added/removed from the pool.
Performance metrics are scarce; our team received feedback that online RDBMS transactions did not perform well on distributed file systems (such as GFS), however this could not be substantiated via any online research or white papers.
after all of the investment made in the tool and considering how many teams use it I think we would not be likely to move away from this tool. A lot of our information including historical is already here and we are happy with the capabilities of the tool currently
Very easy to use. I love having my data backed up. I love that Google Cloud Storage provides me with the peace of mind that I no longer need to worry about my data being lost. I can now sleep better at night. Google Cloud Storage is very easy to use. Overall, you save time and have less stress by using Google Cloud Storage.
For performance i give Google Cloud Storage 10 of 10 on performance because even though there are other softwares that do exactly the same thing as Google Drive, it still works exceptionally well. It is very fast, and and far as integration, the only software I have used with it that integrated was Google Docs, and of course it integrates perfectly.
We have never used official support from Google for our Google Cloud Storage, but there is plenty of documentation in place already. With a small amount of work, anybody should be able to get started. Once needs get more complicated, there is still documentation from Google, but also plenty of community support for common use cases around the internet.
overall I was not directly involved but hears the teams were satisfied with the implementation. the teams that used the tool did not encounter major issues, it was as expected with minor issues and bugs that were resolved later. The more significant learning curve was actually starting to use the tool
We prefer Google Cloud Storage over Amazon Web Services because of the tools and code integration offered by Google Cloud Storage. We found the Google Cloud Storage toolset to be highly usable and give us the fine-grained control we need for managing digital assets. Ultimately, we chose Google Cloud Storage because we found the API and suitability for code integration with our Java codebase to be impeccable and because we had excellent direct support from the Google Cloud Storage team
Gluster is a lot lower cost than the storage industry leaders. However, NetApp and Dell/EMC's product documentation is (IMHO) more mature and hardened against usage in operational scenarios and environments. Using Gluster avoids "vendor lock-in" from the perspective on now having to purchase dedicated hardware and licenses to run it. Albeit, should an organization choose to pay for support for Gluster, they would be paying licensing costs to Red Hat instead of NetApp, Dell, EMC, HP, or VMware. It could be assumed, however, that if an organization wanted to use Gluster, that they were already a Linux shop and potentially already paying Red Hat or Canonical (Debian) for product support, thereby the use of GFS would be a nominal cost adder from a maintenance/training perspective.
It has assisted greatly with our ability to share documents/information cross functionally. Especially within our advertising team, we store a large amount of information to assist new hires and refresh current employees.
Something that could improve is employees' understanding of how to best utilize Google Cloud Storage. This could improve by implementing a potential training video or tutorial.
Overall, Google Storage has been great. I have not used a similar storage product that had the same enterprise level capabilities.
