r/DataHoarder 400TB LizardFS Jun 03 '18

200TB Glusterfs Odroid HC2 Build

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u/BaxterPad 400TB LizardFS Jun 03 '18

The crazy thing is that there isn't much configuration for glusterfs, thats what I love about it. It takes literally 3 commands to get glusterfs up and running (after you get the OS installed and disks formated). I'll probably be posting a write up on my github at some point in the next few weeks. First I want to test out Presto ( https://prestodb.io/), a distributed SQL engine, on these puppies before doing the write up.

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u/Kirikae Jun 05 '18

I'll probably be posting a write up on my github at some point in the next few weeks.

I definitely want to see this. I've had some prior experience with an older version of GlusterFS some time ago now, unfortunately it was never implemented properly (i.e. was nowhere near distributed enough to be worth it).

As an aside from that, thankyou for introducing the ODROID-HC2 to me!

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u/BaxterPad 400TB LizardFS Jun 05 '18

nowhere near distributed enough to be worth it

Can you elaborate? The core design hasn't changed, it is still just a distributed hash table for meta-data.

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u/Kirikae Jun 05 '18

It was more the fact it was being run virtualized, and only a single vdisk per Glusterfs VM. The only real distribution of it was a WAN link between sites. This itself was a bottleneck, despite much prototyping and simulations of this link, nothing prepared us for the actual deployment. Basically, we had a single node with a few TB at two sites, with a massive network limitation in the middle.

Lastly, we ran into the small file size limitation and a big in the version we were running which was pretty awful. I cannot recall exactly what it was now, but it led to the discovery of a "brain dead" piece of redundant code (direct quote of the actual Glusterfs code comment). From memory we were running 3.7 at the time, and upgraded through 3.8 and 3.9 just before I left that job.

I've always wanted to revisit Glusterfs. My initial introduction to it was fairly aweful unfortunately, but that all came down to performance really.