2 Reviews and Ratings
6 Reviews and Ratings
Longhorn Block Storage is well suited for most Kubernetes workloads where data storage is required, but when very high storage speed is essential, Longhorn Block Storage might not be the best solution. For those rare situations, we use local storage mounts. Longhorn Block Storage's ability to easily create/restore volume snapshots is a very frequently used feature among our dev teams because they can easily play multiple scenarios with the same data - modify data, restore it and modify it again.
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.).Incentivized
Creates read-write many (RWX) volumesLonghorn Block Storage is an easy to deploy solutionScheduled and on-demand volume snapshots can be created using web GUIVolume backups can be stored offsite on any S3 compatible storage solutionBackups and snapshots can be restored using web GUI
Scales; bricks can be easily added to increase storage capacityPerforms; I/O is spread across multiple spindles (HDDs), thereby increasing read and write performanceIntegrates 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.Incentivized
Version to version upgrades takes more expertise to do than initial deploymentIf something goes wrong, you will need a help from supportLonghorn Block Storage speed is slightly slower than local disk storage speed
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.Incentivized
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.Incentivized
It has provided a highly available storage solution for almost all our Kubernetes deploymentsWe can deploy new app versions with peace in mind because we have working data backupsApplication development is faster because devs can play with data and easily restore it when needed
Positive - Alignment with the open source community and being able to stay abreast of the latest trending products available.Positive - Reduced procurement and maintenance costs.Negative - Impacts user/system maintainer training in order to teach them how to utilize and troubleshoot the product.Incentivized