[clug] GFS - add some more abstraction [SEC=PERSONAL]

[Robert Brockway]

On Wed, 31 Mar 2010, Roppola, Antti wrote:

> So is it just me, or does GFS suffer from compulsive abstraction?

Definitely.  As others have noted it is intended to be run as part of a 
full-blown cluster.

OCFS2 is an alternative that is happy to list just as a clustered 
filesystem.   I had stability problems under Lenny (2 node cluster) 
unfortunately.

Have you considered distributed filesystems?  They are a different class 
from either clustered filesystems (GFS,GFS2,OCFS2) and network filesystems 
(NFS and lots of others).  One popular distributed filesystem is Lustre.

> It seems a bit of overkill if one just wants a shared filesystem on a
> small private network. I find myself thinking fondly about NFS and
> wondering if GFS is really worth all that extra effort.

A clustered filesystem prevents any one server from being the single point 
of failure (although the SAN remains a SPoF).  Unfortunately I've seen 
clustered filesystems fail to recover properly from server outages more 
often that I would like - generally in a 2-node arrangement.

Rob

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