Introduction

From GlusterFS Documentation
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Most existing cluster file systems are not mature enough for the enterprise market. They are too complex to deploy and maintain, although they are extremely scalable and cheap since they can be entirely built out of commodity OS and hardware.

GlusterFS solves this problem. GlusterFS is an easy to use clustered file system that meets enterprise-level requirements. GlusterFS is an open source, distributed file system capable of scaling to several petabytes (actually, 72 brontobytes!) and handling thousands of clients. GlusterFS clusters together storage building blocks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect, aggregating disk and memory resources and managing data in a single global namespace. It is based on a stackable user space design and can deliver exceptional performance for diverse workloads.

No longer are users locked into costly, monolithic, legacy storage platforms. GlusterFS gives users the ability to deploy scale-out, virtualized storage – scaling from terabytes to petabytes in a centrally managed and commoditized pool of storage,which is available to user(s) in a single mount point, making it simple for the user. It is written in user space which uses FUSE(File system in user space) to hook itself with VFS layer.It takes a layered approach to the file system, where features are added/removed as per the requirement. Though GlusterFS is a File System, it uses already tried and tested disk file systems like ext3, ext4, xfs, etc. to store the data.