[Samba] Samba/GPFS/GlusterFS

[Stan Hoeppner]

On 11/21/2011 1:51 PM, François Legal wrote:

> In my company, we have 2
> distant facilities, with people at each facility working on the same
> files. 
> 
> The 2 facilities are connected through MPLS with about
> 10MBytes/s BW. 
> 
> Saving the work files to servers located at one or the
> other facility has became a pain for the people accessing the files from
> the remote site. 
> 
> Trying to improve files availability, I was wondering
> if a setup based on GPFS/GlusterFS plus samba for serving the file would
> be a good reply to this problem.

If only 2 sites, and never more, DRBD+GFS2+Samba may be a good solution.
 See:  http://www.drbd.org/

With this setup all clients at both sites see the same filesystem (GFS2)
through Samba, but their file access is always to the local server's
disks.  DRBD transparently mirrors the disk blocks between the two
servers.

I'd only consider this DRBD under two conditions:

1.  If that MPLS pipe is rock solid all the time.
2.  Workload is NOT writing many large say 100MB+ files regularly

-- 
Stan