Senior System Engineer in Information Technology at Exeter Government Services, LLC (Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees)
Chose Red Hat Gluster Storage
Gluster is a lot lower cost than the storage industry leaders. However, NetApp and Dell/EMC's product documentation is (IMHO) more mature and hardened against usage in operational scenarios and environments. Using Gluster avoids "vendor lock-in" from the perspective on now …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It is very easy to use with NFS. Creating new volumes and mounting to servers such as ESXi or Linux is a breeze. It does also support CIFS but it is far less intuitive and requires much more effort. Replicated data is also very simple and robust in the form of SnapVaults or SnapMirrors. This data is either immediately or periodically replicated to a peer FAS in the cluster for retention.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
GFS is well suited for DEVOPS type environments where organizations prefer to invest in servers and DAS (direct attached storage) versus purchasing storage solutions/appliances. GFS allows organizations to scale their storage capacity at a fraction of the price using DAS HDDs versus committing to purchase licenses and hardware from a dedicated storage manufacturer (e.g. NetApp, Dell/EMC, HP, etc.).
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Scales; bricks can be easily added to increase storage capacity
Performs; I/O is spread across multiple spindles (HDDs), thereby increasing read and write performance
Integrates well with RHEL/CentOS 7; if your organization is using RHEL 7, Gluster (GFS) integrates extremely well with that baseline, especially since it's come under the Red Hat portfolio of tools.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Documentation; using readthedocs demonstrates that the Gluster project isn't always kept up-to-date as far as documentation is concerned. Many of the guides are for previous versions of the product and can be cumbersome to follow at times.
Self-healing; our use of GFS required the administrator to trigger an auto-heal operation manually whenever bricks were added/removed from the pool. This would be a great feature to incorporate using autonomous self-healing whenever a brick is added/removed from the pool.
Performance metrics are scarce; our team received feedback that online RDBMS transactions did not perform well on distributed file systems (such as GFS), however this could not be substantiated via any online research or white papers.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It just works! We've used NetApp FAS Storage Arrays systems since 2011 and have had fantastic results, in particular since 2016 as performance has drastically improved. Tools are great/user friendly, command line capabilities are very strong ... it is simply very effective at what it does!
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It does have a really nice and easy to use web interface to do pretty much anything you need with it. It was very simple to configure our volumes and luns and connect them to our VMWare environment using the interface. It has options to rename, shrink, grow, and other things with our luns and volumes. It was nice and easy to read graphs to see where you stand on your storage usage at a glance.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
NetApp support in Brazil is managed by its partners. We know in other countries, such as the US and NO, they have support directly from Netapp. We have a very good NetApp partner working with us since the beginning, on both the implementation and daily support. Very few cases needed to be escalated to NetApp support, most of the cases are handled and satisfyingly closed by the partner.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Our initial deployment was handled by pro services. Most later deployments were handled in-house. All went very smoothly. Documentation made it relatively easy to set up new systems which allowed us to do it in-house. When using pro services they were professional and comprehensive.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
NetApp stacked nicely and gave enterprise-level usability for snapshot-based backups. Our previous RPO was several hours. It was selected prior to me arriving at the company, but It was selected for the hardware refreshes due to its compatibility with several other vendors, like CommVault and VMware.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Gluster is a lot lower cost than the storage industry leaders. However, NetApp and Dell/EMC's product documentation is (IMHO) more mature and hardened against usage in operational scenarios and environments. Using Gluster avoids "vendor lock-in" from the perspective on now having to purchase dedicated hardware and licenses to run it. Albeit, should an organization choose to pay for support for Gluster, they would be paying licensing costs to Red Hat instead of NetApp, Dell, EMC, HP, or VMware. It could be assumed, however, that if an organization wanted to use Gluster, that they were already a Linux shop and potentially already paying Red Hat or Canonical (Debian) for product support, thereby the use of GFS would be a nominal cost adder from a maintenance/training perspective.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
