Niels de Vos

An overview of Ceph and Gluster community activities.

This talk is a replacement for the 'Ceph User Committee' talk by Wido den Hollander who was unable to make it to FOSDEM this year due to personal reasons. We hope he can join us next year!

Gluster provides Software Defined Storage for the cloud, and is gaining new functionalities every couple of months. New features make it possible to deploy the cloud storage solution for an increasing number of use-cases.

The Gluster project tries to release a major version every six months. Each version introduces many new features. Use-cases that were not a good fit for Gluster, are getting the improvements so that using Gluster can be considered again. Recently added features include BitRot detection, NFS-Ganesha integration for high-availability NFS access, improved options to prevent split-brain situations and many more. Later in 2016 a major feature release is planned, this will include support for New Style Replication, Distributed Hash Translator v2 and a complete rewrite of the main GlusterD management daemon to make it more scalable.

During the presentation, an introduction into Gluster basics will be given so that the attendees have a good understanding of the technology. With the basic understanding of Gluster, the explanation of the recent and future features will become very understandable.

GlusterFS is a distributed scale-out filesystem that runs on commodity hardware. In this session, Niels de Vos will provide an architectural overview of GlusterFS and discuss how its file, object & block interfaces can be used to build a scale-out storage solution for IaaS needs. Details on new features , use cases and interesting challenges with GlusterFS will be provided. As part of this session, Niels will also discuss integration of GlusterFS with other open source ecosystems like OpenStack, oVirt and provide future directions of the GlusterFS project.