Why Are You NOT Using FreeBSD ?

[Rick Macklem]

David Magda wrote:
> On Jun 1, 2012, at 21:03, Chris Nehren wrote:
> 
> > You say your'e using ZVOLs but then recommend gluster for large
> > filesystems. I would like to take a moment to point out that one of
> > the
> > design goals of ZFS was to scale beyond the capabilities of current
> > hardware.
> >
> > What does gluster do that ZFS does not? I'm not trying to troll
> > here,
> > but am genuinely curious about ZFS's shortfalls in one of the
> > problem
> > domains it seeks to address.
> 
> ZFS is for storing file systems on locally connected block devices.
> Gluster is a network file system where data can be distributed over
> many nodes.
> 
> So ZFS can ensure that bits-on-disk stay safe through checksums and
> mirroring / RAIDZ, while Gluster allows entire file servers to go
> offline and the files are still accessible because you have a kind of
> network-level RAID going on. This also helps in performance since
> instead of clients pounding on one file server (as usually happens
> with NFS), every write is sent to many data nodes so you're striping
> across many network elements. Think of it as NFS on steroids.
> 
> A competitive open source equivalent would be Lustre, while Isilon and
> Panasas would probably be commercial alternatives (though they do NFS
> / CIFS on the 'front-end' and the distributed "magic" occurs on a
> 'back-end' network between the appliances).
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlusterFS
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustre_(file_system)
> 
Just fyi, someone is currently working on an NFSv4.1 pNFS layout type
for Lustre. As such, once that layout is implemented, the NFSv4.1 client
I am working on should be able to use a Lustre server cluster.

So, it could be a while (next summer, maybe?), but that should be FreeBSD
eventually. (I have no idea how easy porting of the Lustre server to FreeBSD
would be?)

Having said the above, I am not familiar with either Gluster or Lustre, so
take the above as based on what little I currently know, rick

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