Gluster reduces procurement costs while allowing highly scalable solutions
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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.
Return on Investment
- 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.
Other Software Used
VMware ESXi, Cisco Catalyst, Dell Force10 Ethernet Switches