Tomorrow we've got a meeting!

Time: 7pm

Location: WPI Student Center Room 331

Topic: glusterfs

What is glusterfs?  It's a distributed clustered file system.  I recently did a talk about GFS2 and while interesting, it requires centralized storage, a knowledge about stuff like iscsi, etc.  It's a beast to setup and isn't that flexible.

glusterfs is a different animal.  It's a flexible overlay filesystem that let's you take a bunch of basic servers and cluster them into a big homogenous filesystem.  If you have four systems, each with 4TB worth of disk, you can make yourself a nice 16TB filesystem, or you can setup an 8TB filesystem with mirroring that spans all the machines or a couple of filesystems that do both depending on your needs.

What's great about glusterfs is that it sits atop an existing filesystems on the machines and uses TCP to communicate with both fs clients and the node members.  It also has a built in NFS server that allows it to be used by other non linux machines.

As usual there will be snacks and refreshments and afterwards we'll head to tech for pizza.

Thanks,

Tim.

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