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Date:      Fri, 1 Jun 2012 23:14:10 -0400
From:      David Magda <dmagda@ee.ryerson.ca>
To:        Chris Nehren <apeiron+freebsd-stable@isuckatdomains.net>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Why Are You NOT Using FreeBSD ?
Message-ID:  <4D744565-4073-485E-B769-82BE1F7E2C0A@ee.ryerson.ca>
In-Reply-To: <20120602010346.GA27660@isuckatdomains.members.linode.com>
References:  <CAOgwaMvsv3e1TxDauV038Pp7LRiYeH7oAODE%2Bw-pxHt9oGrXMA@mail.gmail.com> <20120601121555.GF5335@home.opsec.eu> <4FC8B67D.5090208@digsys.bg> <20120601131236.GJ8591@macbook.bluepipe.net> <20120602010346.GA27660@isuckatdomains.members.linode.com>

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On Jun 1, 2012, at 21:03, Chris Nehren wrote:

> You say your'e using ZVOLs but then recommend gluster for large
> filesystems. I would like to take a moment to point out that one of =
the
> design goals of ZFS was to scale beyond the capabilities of current
> hardware.=20
>=20
> What does gluster do that ZFS does not? I'm not trying to troll here,
> but am genuinely curious about ZFS's shortfalls in one of the problem
> domains it seeks to address.

ZFS is for storing file systems on locally connected block devices. =
Gluster is a network file system where data can be distributed over many =
nodes.

So ZFS can ensure that bits-on-disk stay safe through checksums and =
mirroring / RAIDZ, while Gluster allows entire file servers to go =
offline and the files are still accessible because you have a kind of =
network-level RAID going on. This also helps in performance since =
instead of clients pounding on one file server (as usually happens with =
NFS), every write is sent to many data nodes so you're striping across =
many network elements. Think of it as NFS on steroids.

A competitive open source equivalent would be Lustre, while Isilon and =
Panasas would probably be commercial alternatives (though they do NFS / =
CIFS on the 'front-end' and the distributed "magic" occurs on a =
'back-end' network between the appliances).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlusterFS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustre_(file_system)




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