Re: [Gluster-devel] Online codes

[Kevan Benson]

Aga wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> I am using GlusterFS since a few weeks. Surfing the net I stumbled into this:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_codes
>
> I am wondering if it would be a good idea to make a xlator for GlusterFS using 
> this algorithm.
>
> The advantage of this solution is that you can split a file in N size blocks, 
> and spread them around the bricks. If you lose one brick, you can still 
> reconstruct files combining the remaining blocks. It's also quite efficient.
>
> Kind regards to everybody and compliments for the great job already done!

I'm not sure how you would extrapolate this to a client/server 
architecture, even one where there may be many servers.

It seems optimized for a network where everyone participates in the file 
sharing (indeed it was developed for P2P usage), maximizing the 
possibility that new nodes get data other nodes are less likely to be 
sharing.

I'm not sure how well it would apply to glusterFS, which is 
client/server based, as it seems to require P2P type connections.  Even 
though you CAN run the client and server on the same system in 
GlsuterFS, there's a distinction between where data is served from and 
where it's mounted to, which isn't usually the case in P2P (indeed, it 
can't be the case for this algorithm to work).

Although, maybe GlusterFS is modular enough that there's some real 
interesting translators that can be made to work with this in useful 
ways.  I can't seem to wrap my head around a useful way though.

--

-Kevan Benson
-A-1 Networks