[PLUG] Gluster best practices?

[JP Vossen via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

We are considering using Gluster for a project at work, because it's 
relatively simple and seems to meet our needs.  I was wondering if 
anyone has any experience with using it, best practices, things that 
will bite us, etc.

The use case is pretty simple HCI for data retention.    The hardware we 
use right now maxes out at about 27TB, and there may be cases where we 
need more for a very simple flat-file data archive with a tree structure 
of `CCYY/MM/DD/{daily files <= 1000}`.  Each node has hardware RAID, 
though we'd consider a JBOD config if needed.  We do require some 
resilience so that we can lose at least 1 node in the cluster.  We'd 
also like the ability to add more nodes to grow it as needed, and 
Gluster seems to require adding a either 2 or 3 nodes at a time, which 
makes sense, bit I want to confirm we're not missing something obvious 
that would let us grow 1 node at a time.

We already have a simple 2 node hot/standby HA pair, but that obviously 
doesn't scale beyond the capacity of a single machine (and around 27TB). 
 So this is the next step.  I'm on the edges of this one, it's not my 
project, so I can present ideas or clues but not drive it.  Note the OS 
is Oracle Linux 7.x for better or worse.  (It's worse, but we can't 
change it.)

I know Keith has talked a lot about LizardFS (project activity for which 
seems to have flip-flopped with MooseFS again) and I've suggested them, 
and ZFS, and someone else suggested DRBD.  We already rejected Ceph 
because it flat out wouldn't work on Oracle Linux.  I don't think we've 
even considered BTRFS, and I'm not 100% sure I'd go for ZFS on Linux. 
(ZFS is a no brainer on our FreeNAS, but that's not a fit here.)

Thoughts or clues?

TIA,
JP
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JP Vossen, CISSP | http://www.jpsdomain.org/ | http://bashcookbook.com/
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