Red Hat Gluster Storage vs. StorPool

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

Storpool performs well on block level (and that is what we use it for). It is not yet supporting a kind of distributed filesystem or object storage - a filesystem layer needs to be built on top of it.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Distributed Storage array with very high throughput in terms of reading & write operations.
• Horizontal scaling without much complexity of management.
• Easily integrate with OpenStack cloud.
• Doesn't depend on proprietary hardware, integrates with commodity hardware.

• 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

• Graphical interface is for monitoring and stats, but not for operations.

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

We made a very careful selection of our storage vendor and solution. After researching the newest technologies, our team decided to deploy a software-defined storage solution from StorPool.

• 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

• We have not calculated precise ROI. We focused on getting the best solution at a reasonable price, based on market research. Initially, we didn’t need a lot of capacity, so we invested in servers and network, which could handle several times more capacity, but bought smaller drives to keep the investment low. We achieved a starting price of $3.2/GB usable and $1.4/GB logical. Later we expanded the capacity by adding more drives to the system. Currently, the system has a price of approximately $2.3/GB usable and $0.99/GB logical and a price of $0.09/IOPS.