Disclosure: I'm a Gluster developer. Looks like a pretty good first attempt at a distributed filesystem. Initial impression is HDFS with a distributed NameNod

Disclosure: I'm a Gluster developer. Looks like a pretty good first attempt at a distributed filesystem. Initial impression is HDFS with a distributed NameNode/Nameserver. The first diagram also shows a Metaserver layer that's not mentioned at all in the more recent of the two design docs but "separate Metaerver from Nameserver" appears (unchecked) in the roadmap. All operations using access methods other than their own SDK seem to get funneled through the NameServer cluster, which will severely limit throughput. Not clear how they do replication, though weakly implied that it's driven from the client (like Gluster) or NameServer rather than the first ChunkServer (like Ceph, HDFS, everything else). No mention of how they handle consistency or repair. Likewise no information about performance or security. Not clear if it's anywhere near POSIX compliant (probably not). FUSE support is in the diagrams, but not checked off on the roadmap. Slow-node detection and avoidance seemed like one of the most interesting features from the design, but is not checked off either. Other things not even on the roadmap, using Gluster not as a fair comparison but as a handy list of possibilities: multiple replication levels, tiering, erasure coding, NFS/SMB, caching, quota, snapshots. As I said, looks like a good first attempt. Better than most I've seen, with lots of potential, but as of today it seems rather bare-bones. Many hard problems remain to be solved, and I wish them well.