Point about GlusterFS. I've used it for the past 5 years and found out that its reliable, reasonably well updated, and very flexible. However, you desperately

Point about GlusterFS. I've used it for the past 5 years and found out that its reliable, reasonably well updated, and very flexible. However, you desperately need a fast network to take advantage of it even in a small sized cluster (N < 10). In a midsized cluster, latency will kill you from all angles unless you have very low throughput. Lastly, do not rely on their NUMFA translator. If you need sharding then do it yourself. Also striping a large file system with many small files will make it slower rather than faster because of seek locality. I've managed to hack out a system that works without maintenance now for 1 year plus, but if I had to do it again I'd go in with a lot of testing and an eye to write my own translator or at least highly customize one that they ship with. Their code is clean. Its a saving grace.