Vault 2016

GlusterFS is a scalable network filesystem to create large, distributed storage solutions. Sakshi Bansal and Susant Palai will talk about the need for a distributed file system and give an introduction to GlusterFS. The talk will mainly focus on how GlusterFS manages distributions of files and directories through Distributed Hash Table (DHT). They will also review on some of the recently introduced key features to DHT that improve performance. Finally they will give a short demo on the working of GlusterFS.

Some block storage device standards are working on a “logical depop" function which allows a system to decommission a defective physical element, e.g. a disk head or an SSD die or channel, reformat the device and continue using it with a reduced capacity. Such feature can allow reduced operation costs (delayed device replacement) but has the drawback of data loss (data under the remaining valid physical elements) and device downtime during re-formatting.

Online logical depop is another proposed new feature allowing retaining the device valid data and eliminating the need for a re-format. The basic idea is to introduce new commands for the host to discover the ranges of LBAs impacted by a defective element. Using this information, the host can take actions when an element failure event is suspected or reported by the device: deallocate the LBAs served by the defective element and operate the device in a thin-provisioned mode, amputate the LBAs or truncate the device LBA range to restore operation as a fully provisioned device with a lower capacity.

The goal of this BoF is to discuss the usefulness of such features and gather feedback from different application and system point of views for drafting a standard minimizing the impact of this feature on existing systems as well as enabling enhanced functionality for file systems,  device mapper drivers (including logical volume manager) and application level distributed storage systems (key value stores, object stores).

LVM is a powerful, enterprise tool that uses Linux's Devicemapper subsystem to provide a wealth of possibilities for organizing and optimizing attached block storage. But, with power comes complexity. Dealing with errors, or even just making changes may cause infrequent users of the LVM tools to feel uneasy. Froyo provides a more managed storage solution -- feed it disks, and it gives you "a filesystem where your data is safe forever that never runs out of space".

Of course, under the covers are familiar technologies -- devicemapper and XFS, with Froyo pulling the strings. Andy Grover will talk about the development and implementation of Froyo, how it manages seamless online reconfiguration and monitoring of its member disks, and look forward to possible future improvements that leverage existing DM capabilities in new ways.

After 10+ years of NTB in specialized hardware, PCI-express Non-Transparent Bridge technology is making its entrance into retail off the shelf server solutions. Linux, with its selection of open source drivers for NTB, is strategically positioned to unlock the value of this low cost, low latency, high bandwidth interconnect.

The Ceph upstream community is declaring CephFS stable for the first time in the recent Jewel release, but that declaration comes with caveats: while we have filesystem repair tools and a distributed POSIX filesystem, we have disabled exciting features like horizontally-scalable metadata servers and snapshots. This talk will present — from a developer’s perspective — exactly what features you can expect to see, what blocked the inclusion of other features, and an outline of what work we’ve done to reach this point and what work is required moving forward.

Many enterprises still heavily depend on NFS to access their data from different operating systems and applications. NFS-Ganesha is a user-space NFS server that supports NFSv3, NFSv4, NFSv4.1, as well as pNFS.

GlusterFS has now added NFS-Ganesha server to its NFS stack to eventually replace the 'native' Gluster-NFS server which supports only NFSv3. The integration with NFS-Ganesha now means additional protocol support for NFSv4+, and better security and authentication mechanisms for enterprise use. The recent release of GlusterFS-3.7 introduced clustered, multi-head, active/active NFS support using Pacemaker and Corosync for High Availability. There is also tighter integration with Gluster CLI to manage NFS-Ganesha exports. This presentation is aimed at providing a basic overview of the entire solution and step-by-step configuration.

Distributed storage solutions such as Ceph pose unique challenges in Enterprise environments. Currently, there is no comprehensive Open Source management system available that integrates Ceph with traditional storage approaches. To remedy this, it-novum and SUSE have partnered to collaborate to bring Ceph support to the openATTIC project.
openATTIC is a comprehensive storage management solution with a clean and intuitive web-based user interface. In development since 5 years, it is based on a modern and extensible architecture built with proven web technologies (AngularJS, Bootstrap) and frameworks (Django). It follows a completely Open Source development process. It supports a wide range of storage technologies, both file- and block-based, e.g. NFS, CIFS, iSCSI and FibreChannel (LIO). All functionality is available via the web, CLI, and RESTful APIs through a common backend.