I would like to have a scalable storage system as backed for web servers serving php/HTML.
I was looking at glusterfs, that seems rather stable.
My question is, does it really scale? Can I think to host a lot of loaded website on the top of glusterfs? Or these are just dreams? If you have any better alternative please suggest.
MySQL will use its own storage.
If there's anything Gluster does - it is scale. Linearly and pretty much infinitely.
GlusterFS is an open source, distributed file system capable of scaling to several petabytes (actually, 72 brontobytes!) and handling thousands of clients. GlusterFS clusters together storage building blocks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect, aggregating disk and memory resources and managing data in a single global namespace. GlusterFS is based on a stackable user space design and can deliver exceptional performance for diverse workloads.
from the official website
GlusterFs is for sure a good option, latest version ( 3.4 ) now has improved self healing functions. If you want to give it a try, it looks very promising having glusterfs on top of zfs.
Zfs now is available as fuse or kernel native module for linux and it can substitute xfs + lvm, giving a robust and scalable fs for your data nodes. Moreover as a bonus you can enable data compression and data deduplication at a price of some performance and ram.
