Best distributed filesystem for commodity linux storage farm
I have a lot of spare intel linux servers laying around (hundreds) and want to use them for a distributed file system in a web hosting and file sharing environment. This isn't for a HPC application, so high performance isn't critical. The main requirement is high availability, if one server goes offline, the data stored on it's hard drives is still available from other nodes. It must run over TCP/IP and provide standard POSIX file permissions.
I've looked at the following:
Lustre (http://wiki.lustre.org/index.php?title=Main_Page): Comes really close, but it doesn't provide redundancy for data on a node. You must make the data HA using RAID or DRBD. Supported by Sun and Open Source, so it should be around for a while
gfarm (http://datafarm.apgrid.org/): Looks like it provides the redundancy but at the cost of complexity and maintainability. Not as well supported as Lustre.
Does anyone have any experience with these or any other systems that might work?
Answer
check also GlusterFS
Edit (Aug-2012): Ceph is finally getting ready. Recently the authors formed Inktank, an independent company to sell commercial support for it. According to some presentaions, the mountable POSIX-compliant filesystem is the uppermost layer and not really tested yet, but the lower layers are being used in production for some time now.
The interesting part is the RADOS layer, which presents an object-based storage with both a 'native' access via the librados library (available for several languages) and an Amazon S3-compatible RESP API. Either one makes it more than adequate for adding massive storage to a web service.
This video is a good description of the philosophy, architecture, capabilities and current status.