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.).
The team in charge of implementing Scality has to be full stack in order to guarantee the correct functioning of the entire system. However, you have to think very carefully about the balance between servers and disks, perhaps adopting smaller fully populated servers instead of large semi-populated servers, which would mean that over time our disk updates will not have a fully useful life.
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.
As an organization, it took us a while to understand the shift from a traditional black box SAN to software-defined storage, but now we are much more certain of what this means. The time invested and the resources were not very high, thanks on the one hand to the technical support and on the other to the coherence and good development of the platform.
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.
Due to the nature of our business we require extensive encryption and availability for sensitive customer data. The erasure encoding that Scality provides gives us the assurance that documents are rest are never in a state of being downloaded or available to a casual data thief. This is something that can be found with other vendors but at a fraction of the same cost. Having this kind of performance, availability and redundancy at the cost that Scality provides has made a large difference to our organization.
Keeping sensitive customer data secure is a must for our organization and Scality has great features to make this happen.
We replaced a single SAN with a Scality ring and found performance to improve as we store more and more customer data.
Being able to lose various portions of our Scality ring and allow it to continue to service customers while maintaining high performance has been key to our business.
