HAST (Highly Available Storage) now in HEAD.

[Garrett Cooper]

On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 12:07 PM, Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Hi.
>
> Yesterday I committed HAST to the HEAD branch.
>
> HAST allows to transparently store data on two physically separated
> machines connected over the TCP/IP network. HAST works in
> Primary-Secondary (Master-Backup, Master-Slave) configuration, which
> means that only one of the cluster nodes can be active at any given
> time. Only Primary node is able to handle I/O requests to HAST-managed
> devices. Currently HAST is limited to two cluster nodes in total.
>
> HAST operates on block level - it provides disk-like devices in
> /dev/hast/ directory for use by file systems and/or applications.
> Working on block level makes it transparent for file systems and
> applications. There in no difference between using HAST-provided device
> and raw disk, partition, etc. All of them are just regular GEOM
> providers in FreeBSD.
>
> For more information please consult hastd(8), hastctl(8) and
> hast.conf(5) manual pages, as well as:
>
>        http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/HAST
>
> On the wiki page above you should find instructions how to initialize
> hast and integrate it with ucarp.

    Very cool stuff. How many nodes max are you targeting for this
service and what are some of the performance numbers for syncing
across the network (say with a 1GigE or 10GigE connection)?
Cheers,
-Garrett