During my talks, I often try to make the point that horizontally scalable systems are often necessary not only to achieve high aggregate performance but also to overcome performance variation. This is true in general, but especially in a public cloud. In that environment, performance variation both between nodes and over time is much greater […]

Automated cluster creation in VMs by scriptifying your KVM setups.Automatically provisioning VM clusters comes up alot:When you want to simulate / practice installing a clustered app or utility. When you want to confirm that workload distribution is o…

Heading to LinuxCon Japan 2013? If you’ll be attending the conference or will be in Tokyo on May 31st, we’d like to welcome you at the Gluster Community Workshop. We’ll have a full day of talks on all things Gluster, including: Creating a Shared Storage Service with GlusterFS by Keisuke Takahashi Converged Infrastructure: Leveraging oVirt …Read more

Apparently, at RICON East today, Seagate’s James Hughes said something like this. Any distributed filesystem like GlusterFS or Ceph that tries to preserve the POSIX API will go the way of the dodo bird. I don’t actually know the exact quote. The above is from a tweet by Basho’s Seth Thomas, and is admittedly a […]

I have been a little slow on the uptake on this one. I would like to say it is because I was carefully digesting the information, but that is not true; the reality is that I have just had 2 5 day weekends in 2 weeks :-).

The big announcement at thi…

As the GlusterFest winds down today, I wanted to write a few words about GlusterFS 3.4 and the beta that was just released yesterday. You may have noticed the news release from Red Hat: The Red Hat Storage team would like to congratulate the Gluster Community on the beta release of GlusterFS 3.4. With new …Read more

Amidst the madness of the OpenStack Summit a couple of weeks ago, you could be forgiven for not seeing a Red Hat announcement about GlusterFS being “OpenStack-ready”. You may wonder, what exactly do we mean by “OpenStack-ready”? The first thing to understand is that storage in OpenStack is multifaceted. It could mean applications storing objects …Read more

Had a potential GlusterFS user state that the filesystem incorrectly reported that a write succeeded even though all the servers were powered off. Since this sounded rather impossible, I asked for details and duplicated the problem. This is the php cod…

The first beta of glusterfs 3.4 is scheduled for release tomorrow, and the project plans to greet this new beta with GlusterFest: a 24-hour test day, starting at 8pm PDT May 7/03:00 UTC May 8. Since I plan on participating … Continue reading →

After quite some delay, I have been able to try out a work-in-progress kernel-tree (3.7) from Sascha Hauer for the Genesi EFIKA MX Smartbook. The Fedora Remix image I have created uses the barebox bootloader to load the device-tree and the kernel (a…

Today, I’m happy to finally unveil something that we’ve been working on for a couple of months now: the Gluster Community Forge. We noticed some time ago that there were several projects out on the internet that extended GlusterFS, and we thought it would be nice to give them a home, where users could find …Read more

Unless this is your first time reading my blog, you are probably aware that I am beginning to become obsessed with the idea of a data transfer service.  In this post I continue the topic from my previous post by introducing a couple of diagrams. A diagram of a possible swift deployment is on the […]

The HDFS write path is lonnnng and hairy.  Here’s some imagery of it (somewhat raw and undervalidated, so please comment if something looks funny).Have you ever seen those little salmons that swim ALL THE WAY up the river, into the ocean, just to …

Archiva is a fully open alternative to Nexus – a simple web-ui for managing and serving up your maven repos.  Setting up a maven repository is as simple as setting up a web accessible directory structure, for example, you can do this using nothing…

Knowing when to release and deploy your code can turn into a complicated discussion. In general, In general, I tend to support releasing early and often, for some value of $early and $often. I’ve decided to keep this simple and … Continue reading →

Here’s an introduction to GlusterFS’ regression testing framework, introduced after 3.3. This will be an important part of testing the imminent GlusterFS 3.4 beta.

{% img right /images/NetappClustering.jpg %}I’ve had a another bee in my bonnet recently. Specifically, it has been to do with hardware vs software RAID, but I think it goes deeper than that. It started a couple of months back with a discussion on Redd…

When I first learned about versioning you were told to “commit often”.  On larger open source projects I’ve been painfully learning that the story is a little different — you want to squash the granularity of your commits so that there is a 1-1 c…

Recently I bought a new keyboard, which I intend to use when my laptop is placed in its docking station. There are two external monitors connected, making the display of the laptop rather useless (only two outputs are supported at the same time). In no…

Playing with gluster in a simple Fedora VM gives you a chance to mess with the translator stack, fine tune your install, and other general aspects of glusterd maintenance.  Here’s an easy to rebuild and tear down gluster-development-environment …