GlusterFS Concepts

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• GlusterFS
• Storage Concepts

Overview

GlusterFS is a storage technology that uses volumes hosted on different servers to construct a distributed replicated network file system. The file system is fully POSIX compliant. It also supports storage paradigms as Block Storage and Object Storage. GlusterFS stores the data on stable kernel file-systems like ext4 or xfs. It does not use an additional metadata server, it uses instead an unique hash tag for each file, stored within the file system itself. GlusterFS uses the concept of volume GlusterFS is free and open source software and can utilize common off-the-shelf hardware

Volume

A volume is a logical share exposed to clients. A volume may consist in several subvolumes, generally hosted by different servers. The servers in question host kernel space file-systems.

Volume Types

The volume types below can be mixed.

Distributed Volume

A distributed volume spreads the data across the available bricks. 100 files written on a volume built by two bricks, on average 50 will end up on one brick, and 50 on the other. The system is similar to RAID0 for physical disks.

Replicated Volume

A replicated volume transparently replicates the data with configurable multiplicity (number of file replicas). The multiplicity is a characteristic of a volume, chosen when the volume is created.

Subvolume

A subvolume is built by a brick.

Organizatiorium

Provides two interface to storage: POSIX file-system and via a REST gateway for object storage support.

Provides high availability of data and metadata.

Heketi Heketi provides a RESTful management interface which can be used to manage the life cycle of GlusterFS volumes https://github.com/heketi/heketi