GlusterFS

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GlusterFS
Developed by	Gluster Core Team
Latest release	1.3.9 / 14th May 2008
OS	Any POSIX-compliant
Genre	Distributed file system
License	GNU General Public License v3
Website	http://www.glusterfs.org

GlusterFS is a free software parallel distributed file system, capable of scaling to several petabyte.

GlusterFS is a powerful network/cluster filesystem. GlusterFS package comes with two components, a server and a client. The storage server (or each in a cluster) runs glusterfsd and the clients use mount command or glusterfs client to mount the exported filesystem. Storage can be kept scaling beyond petabytes as demand increases.

To mount GlusterFS file systems, the client computers need FUSE support in the kernel. Servers can run on any node, without any extra prerequisites. As of date, GlusterFS server is tested on Linux, FreeBSD and Opensolaris, and client runs on only Linux machines. Currently with 1.3.9 release onwards GlusterFS runs both client and server on MacOSX Leopard.

GlusterFS is one of the few projects which supports different types of communication transports like TCP/IP, InfiniBand VAPI/Verbs, Sockets Direct Protocol and Unix domain sockets.

[edit] Features

Very modular design, has each features as translators borrowed from GNU/Hurd operating system. which can be plugged in depending on the users' requirement.
Automatic File Replication.
Can use Stripe translator for getting more i/o performance for large files.
No kernel patches required. So the software can be installed not actually having a downtime of the servers.