I’ve been using NFS for some months now to share user-uploaded files on
a Rails-based music community site. The files are mainly MP3 and images.
I’m currently investigating alternative systems to share the files
between the systems, because of poor performance of NFS in our setup and
to better scale in the future.
MogileFS seems interesting, scales well and is heavily used on some Web
sites. I also want to test some distributed file systems (at the
OS-level) as it would be less intrusive.
Your best bet for a shared posix compliant clustering filesystem
that will not require you to change your code to use it is GFS
We use this heavily as a shared filesystem between app server nodes.
It holds the rails app code as well as all the page and fragment
caches. So any one node in the cluster can generate or expire a cache
and its instantly mirrored to all nodes.
GFS is in every way superior to NFS. But it does require SAN.
GFS seems very interesting but unfortunately I’m not sure shared
storage is a possibility for now. I hope it would. Ezra, your setup
looks amazing
Right now were using GPFS and evaluating lustre. The admins haven’t
really come to a conclusion as to which direction were going. The
permissions required to run GPFS have a bad smell in my opinion.
GPFS is not free, I’ll try the other alternatives before evaluating
it. Lustre seems a very good option. What do you think?
Ezra, do you have any experience with options not requiring shared
storage?
Right now were using GPFS and evaluating lustre. The admins haven’t
really come to a conclusion as to which direction were going. The
permissions required to run GPFS have a bad smell in my opinion.
–R
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