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Comment by ccomputinggeek | Hacker News Reader

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ccomputinggeek·

Yes agreed, distributed block storage is definitely the future. Nice to see Linux pioneering this too.

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Without intending disrespect toward Linux, DRDB-like storage has been around for a number of years.

There are examples that have been in production for at least a dozen years in commercial operating system deployments.

The following is multi-host RAID-1 storage, known as host-based volume shadowing (HBVS) storage:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/84FINAL/ba554_90020/ba554_9002...

Getting DRDB working is certainly interesting and not a small project, though dealing with the many and various error cases is the truly entertaining part of the effort. Different devices and different failures can and eventually will toss back errors, and with different timing. And from experience with HBVS, these errors can and do shake out in production, and that's bad.

I meant an pioneering an open source solution. You are right, there are proprietary (very expensive and complicated) solutions out there that you can use. My point is, when the open source community puts its head together on a problem they usually come out with something that's pretty stable and secure. Both properties are advantageous in file systems and DRDB like storage solutions :-)

Agreed. I think the post misses out the new file systems supporting the new Linux roll-out. I believe ButterFS is extremely interesting with regards to distributed block storage for example.

By "extremely interesting" do you mean "not distributed at all"?

You can use ButterFS in conjunction with Sheepdog to achieve de-duplification, snapshotting etc. There are a number of choices of combinations but ButterFS is definitely one option.

Patrick, CEO, CloudSigma

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