Gluster users - Jun 2011 - Gluster in a windows environment - Replacing MS fileserver?

Hi,
Ive read just about everything i can find out there on Gluster, and 
waded through a lot of the old posts on the user-list. I'm wondering 
what the current state of gluster is for interop. with windows 7 clients.

I work for a company that deals with images - a lot of them are jpegs 
around 2Mb and raw camera images at 14-20Mb. We generate about 4-6 Tb of 
these each year.

Currently we use expensive (fibre channel disk) block based storage over 
4G fibre SAN; attached to this is a Ployserve (a HP product now) 
active/active cluster of 4 windows servers. All of this is due for a 
refresh this year (Servers with faster I/O and 10GE network) and i'm 
looking at all the alternatives, HP have an (IBRIX sourced) array with 2 
front end servers, runs redhat, feature set similar to gluster....

I'm wondering you have any experience with a Gluster config, with a 
similar workload? What about windows 7 enterprise clients - use NFS or 
Samba?

I'm considering gluster nodes as HP DL180G6 with 25x 2.5" 300Gb 10K SAS
Drives in each (to keep the number of spindles up). A pair of 10GbE 
cards for connectivity. Do you have any thoughts on this possible 
config? If you were building a Gluster system from scratch with an 
Medium/Large business budget, how would you do it?

Thanks for any help you can give with my questions.

-- 

Jonathan Collingridge
IT Manager

	MSP Photography <http://www.msp.com.au>
jonathan.collingridge at msp.com.au <mailto:jonathan.collingridge at
msp.com.au>
+61 2 6933 7746
skype: jonathancollingridge
PO Box 8459 Kooringal NSW 2650

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On 06/06/2011 01:34 AM, Jonathan Collingridge wrote:
> Hi,
> Ive read just about everything i can find out there on Gluster, and 
> waded through a lot of the old posts on the user-list. I'm wondering 
> what the current state of gluster is for interop. with windows 7 clients.
>
> I work for a company that deals with images - a lot of them are jpegs 
> around 2Mb and raw camera images at 14-20Mb. We generate about 4-6 Tb 
> of these each year.
>
> Currently we use expensive (fibre channel disk) block based storage 
> over 4G fibre SAN; attached to this is a Ployserve (a HP product now) 
> active/active cluster of 4 windows servers. All of this is due for a 
> refresh this year (Servers with faster I/O and 10GE network) and i'm 
> looking at all the alternatives, HP have an (IBRIX sourced) array with 
> 2 front end servers, runs redhat, feature set similar to gluster....
>
> I'm wondering you have any experience with a Gluster config, with a 
> similar workload? What about windows 7 enterprise clients - use NFS or 
> Samba?
>
> I'm considering gluster nodes as HP DL180G6 with 25x 2.5" 300Gb
10K
> SAS Drives in each (to keep the number of spindles up). A pair of 
> 10GbE cards for connectivity. Do you have any thoughts on this 
> possible config? If you were building a Gluster system from scratch 
> with an Medium/Large business budget, how would you do it?
>
> Thanks for any help you can give with my questions.
hi!

We use glusterfs in a similar environment (VFX) and it works:

- 5 nodes, each has 10x750 7200 RPM SATA HDDs
- GE network (with bonding in the cluster nodes)
- samba
- at this time we are running Gluster Storage Platform (FC11) and we are 
planning to move to glusterfs 3.1

It works with samba pretty well, but could not achieve the maximum speed 
with one instance. We get the best speed when we use the nodes parallell 
way. So on the (render) clients we map shares from all the nodes and 
multiple render process is working on machines at the same time. This 
way the speed grows up almost linearly.

tamas
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On Mon, 06 Jun 2011 09:34:14 +1000, Jonathan Collingridge  wrote:
  Hi,

Ive read just about everything i can find out there on Gluster, and waded
through a lot of the old posts on the user-list. I'm wondering what the
current state of gluster is for interop. with windows 7 clients. 

 I work
for a company that deals with images - a lot of them are jpegs around 2Mb
and raw camera images at 14-20Mb. We generate about 4-6 Tb of these each
year.

 Currently we use expensive (fibre channel disk) block based storage
over 4G fibre SAN; attached to this is a Ployserve (a HP product now)
active/active cluster of 4 windows servers. All of this is due for a
refresh this year (Servers with faster I/O and 10GE network) and i'm
looking at all the alternatives, HP have an (IBRIX sourced) array with 2
front end servers, runs redhat, feature set similar to gluster....

 I'm
wondering you have any experience with a Gluster config, with a similar
workload? What about windows 7 enterprise clients - use NFS or Samba?

 I'm
considering gluster nodes as HP DL180G6 with 25x 2.5" 300Gb 10K SAS Drives
in each (to keep the number of spindles up). A pair of 10GbE cards for
connectivity. Do you have any thoughts on this possible config? If you were
building a Gluster system from scratch with an Medium/Large business
budget, how would you do it?

 Thanks for any help you can give with my
questions.

-- 

 Jonathan Collingridge  
IT Manager   		 +61 2 6933 7746 

skype: jonathancollingridge 
 PO Box 8459 Kooringal NSW 2650 




Links:
------
[1] http://www.msp.com.au
[2]
mailto:jonathan.collingridge at msp.com.au
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