GlusterFS One Storage Server to Rule Them All
Eric B. Boyer, Matthew Broomfield, Terrell A. Perrotti · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 2012
GlusterFS is a Linux based distributed file system, designed to be highly scalable and serve many clients. Some reasons to use GlusterFS are: No centralized metadata server, Scalability, Open Source, Dynamic and live service modifications, Can be used over Infiniband or Ethernet, Can be tuned for speed and/or resilience and Flexible administration. It's useful for enterprise environments - virtualization; high performance computing (HPC) and it works with Mac, Linux and Windows clients. Conclusions are: (1) GlusterFS proved to have widespread capabilities as a virtual file system; (2) Scalability is very dependent upon the underlying hardware; (3) Lack of built-in encryption and security paradigm; and (4) Best suited in a general purpose computing environment.