Are there any serverless distributed filesystems?

Question

Similar to Is there a Distributed SAN/Storage System out there? or Distributed redundant storage solution?, except with a couple key differences (and two years newer).

Context: I have a small Rocks cluster (a few dozen machines of varying capabilities), and would like to have all of my nodes pool their excess storage space to allow for a distributed filesystem. I maybe can spare a machine that would act as a server for it, but would prefer not to.

Unlike the above, all of these machines share user lists, and no user can gain root--security and encryption concerns are nearly negligible. (FS mounted by root; contains one directory per user with their perms)

I feel like it should be pretty easy to do, I just can't find any solutions that aren't WAY more complicated than what I'm looking for.

EDIT: My motivation is that every now and then a big IO load hits, taking down the NFS. I am well aware that "go buy a nice SAN with a bunch of SSDs" is a quite nice solution; it's just not available at the moment--I'd like to know what I can do with software and the hardware I have.

I read over its description before, but hadn't previously considered making all machines simultaneously clients and servers... does that even work? (without insane overhead) — zebediah49, Jun 13 '12 at 01:32
I don't think you have to use clients as servers, but it is a versatile file virtualization platform. — uSlackr, Jun 13 '12 at 01:35
It doesn't appear designed for that-- I was wondering if I could choose to do so (so I don't have to dedicate any servers). I believe the answer might be yes. — zebediah49, Jun 13 '12 at 01:42

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 19 '12 at 00:02

This isn't a very good answer, but I'd like to make the question closed.

uSlackr's suggestion of GlustreFS seems to the best option. There are a number of examples of it being used on clusters, and its elastic hash metadata model means that there is no centralized metadata server.

There is nothing that says a single machine cannot run both client and server.

That said, it fulfills the requirements as outlined.

Are there any serverless distributed filesystems?

1 Answers1