Gluster users - Oct 2012 - Offering a private backend Gluster volume to a public network.

We have a distributed/replicated gluster volume running on IPoIB.    We
don't yet know much about its performance in practice.   The volume will be
mounted natively  to our HPC compute cluster and used for nextgen sequence
analysis.   The HPC compute cluster and the Gluster volume are in the same
private IB network.

The problem is, we need a way to get data from sequencers and other sources
living on the public network /into/ the Gluster volume.   The Gluster
bricks have gigE NICs on the public side in addition to the Infiniband
connections.   My first thought is to have each Gluster brick also act as a
Gluster client, mount its own volume, then re-export the mount point  by
NFS or CIFS to the public network.
        Alternatively, I could set up some number of servers that are /not/
Gluster bricks, but are Gluster clients, and those servers would have IB
and GigE -- then have those servers re-export the mounted Gluster volumes
by NFS or CIFS.   Neither of these models seems terribly efficient, but
getting data into the volume won't be as intense and running analysis
software against the volume.

1. Has anyone done this (or something similar)?
2. Did it work acceptably?
3. Does anyone have a better solution?

(There is an article in which there is a suggestion that Gluster volumes be
accessible by multiple addresses natively, but it's not implemented
anywhere as far as I know.)

Matt

------
Matt Temple
Director, Research Computing
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
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Hi Matthew - did you get a response to this? Harry Mangalam from UC Irvine has
been doing what sounds like similar things. I would be happy to put you guys in
touch.

Also, I guess my main question is that I don't understand why or how getting
"data from sequencers and other sources living on the public network /into/
the Gluster volume" is a problem. Are you saying that, as structured now,
you can't get the data into GlusterFS? Or that you can but it's not
performing well?

If your GlusterFS servers have gigE NICs on the public network, couldn't you
just use the NFS server in GlusterFS? Wouldn't that also be available over
the public network?

-JM 

----- Original Message -----
> We have a distributed/replicated gluster volume running on IPoIB. We
> don't yet know much about its performance in practice. The volume
> will be mounted natively to our HPC compute cluster and used for
> nextgen sequence analysis. The HPC compute cluster and the Gluster
> volume are in the same private IB network.
> The problem is, we need a way to get data from sequencers and other
> sources living on the public network /into/ the Gluster volume. The
> Gluster bricks have gigE NICs on the public side in addition to the
> Infiniband connections. My first thought is to have each Gluster
> brick also act as a Gluster client, mount its own volume, then
> re-export the mount point by NFS or CIFS to the public network.
> Alternatively, I could set up some number of servers that are /not/
> Gluster bricks, but are Gluster clients, and those servers would
> have IB and GigE -- then have those servers re-export the mounted
> Gluster volumes by NFS or CIFS. Neither of these models seems
> terribly efficient, but getting data into the volume won't be as
> intense and running analysis software against the volume.
> 1. Has anyone done this (or something similar)?
> 2. Did it work acceptably?
> 3. Does anyone have a better solution?
> (There is an article in which there is a suggestion that Gluster
> volumes be accessible by multiple addresses natively, but it's not
> implemented anywhere as far as I know.)
> Matt
> ------
> Matt Temple
> Director, Research Computing
> Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
> _______________________________________________
> Gluster-users mailing list
> Gluster-users at gluster.org
> http://supercolony.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/gluster-users
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