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GlusterFS vs. Ceph
Everywhere I go, people ask me about Ceph. That’s hardly surprising, since we’re clearly rivals – which by definition means we’re not enemies. In fact I love Ceph and the people who work on it. The...
View ArticleUpdate on Ceph vs. GlusterFS
Since my last post has generated a bit of attention, I want to make sure the most important parts are not lost on anyone. First, let me reiterate: I love Ceph. I value Sage as a colleague and as an...
View ArticlePlugin Initialization
Like many programs, GlusterFS has a plugin interface. We call them translators, but the idea is the same – use dlopen to load modules according to configuration, use dlsym to find functions with...
View ArticleTwo Kinds of Open Source
There are two schools of thought about when you should release open-source code. One school says you should release it as early as it has any chance whatsoever of being useful or informative to other...
View ArticleFAST’13
I got back from the USENIX File And Storage Technologies conference yesterday. It actually ended on Friday, but I don’t much care for flight schedules that get me to Boston well after midnight so I...
View ArticleGdb Macros For GlusterFS
In previous jobs, especially at Revivio, I’ve spent a pretty fair amount of time creating gdb macros to make the inevitable debugging sessions a bit more productive. I’ve generally tried to stay away...
View ArticleGlusterFS, cscope, and vim (oh my!)
I’m generally pretty old-school when it comes to programming tools. Many IDE features either leave me cold (auto-complete) or seem actively harmful to understanding the code as it really is (“project”...
View ArticleMounting GlusterFS as an Unprivileged User
Somebody asked on Twitter whether it was possible, so I tried it. I was able to make it work, but only with some code changes and other very nasty hacks. For the record, here’s what I had to do. Remove...
View ArticleObject Mania
Apparently, at RICON East today, Seagate’s James Hughes said something like this. Any distributed filesystem like GlusterFS or Ceph that tries to preserve the POSIX API will go the way of the dodo...
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Performance Variation in the Cloud
During my talks, I often try to make the point that horizontally scalable systems are often necessary not only to achieve high aggregate performance but also to overcome performance variation. This is...
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