Gluster reduces procurement costs while allowing highly scalable solutions
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Red Hat Gluster Storage is being used by our organization to implement a scalable, redundant, and performant storage solution that reduces procurement costs. Our organization was a NetApp NAS shop, which in itself presents major licensing, hardware, and maintenance costs. Our team evaluated options to reduce storage costs while improving the user experience and trending into the open source community to ensure the latest and greatest baselines available to utilize.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.).
