GlusterFS For Linux

GlusterFS is a free, portable, open source command-line software, a scale-out, poly-protocol and unified filesystem that contains clustered file storage and can easily be scaled to petabytes. It is a programmable system.

The program is very easy to setup and manage. Its components can be rearranged, using the translator interface, to redesign the entire filesystem, allowing it to be flexible for all sorts of storage needs.

It comes with various command-line options, which can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘glusterfs --help’ command on a terminal emulator. These include the ability to choose a file to use as volume file and for logging, change the logging severity, specify the server to get the volume file from, as well as the maximum number of attempts to the respective server.

Among various advanced command-line options, we can mention the ability to mount the filesystem with POSIX ACL support, use 32-bit inodes when mounting the filesystem (very useful for applications that don’t support 64-bit inodes), and run the ability to run the program in debug mode.

It is possible to not purge the cache when opening the file, choose a file to use as unix-socket, select a transport type to get the volfile from server, specify the translator name that can be used as the mount point, and add or override translator options in volume file.

Several FUSE options are also available, including support for using direct I/O mode in the FUSE kernel module, dump FUSE traffic to a specific location, set auxiliary group list timeout in seconds for FUSE translator, use the readdirp mode in FUSE kernel module or enable strict volume file checking.

Gluster is an open source GNU cluster distribution targeted at commoditizing Superstorage and Supercomputing. It provides a platform for developing clustering apps designed for a specific task, such as Storage Clustering, HPC Clustering, Database Clustering, or Enterprise Provisioning.