[Gluster-users] Transitioning to Gluster

[Andrew Herr Watts]

Hello,

I've been investigating Gluster as a solution to some of our website's
file-storage needs.  We currently have about 500GB of data, mostly
images, which are stored on a single server and shared via NFS to our
other servers.  Unfortunately, we're coming close to running out of
space in this setup, and we'd like to move to a GlusterFS system.  I
have a question (actually several, but I'll keep it to one for the
moment) about how we might go about implementing Gluster in our case.

We'd like to distribute this across 3-4 servers, using a combination
of the AFR and DHT translators to do so.  I can see two possible ways
to do this, depending on the order in which the translators are
stacked.  We could either have AFR replicating files between a pair of
DHT server sets, or we could have a DHT of AFR server pairs.  Is there
a preferred way to go here?  What are the advantages / drawbacks of
the different ways?

Thanks,

Andrew Watts
awatts at gmail.com