[Beowulf] GlusterFS 1.2-BENKI (GNU Cluster File System) - Announcement

[Mark Hahn]

> As glusterfs is a parallel filesystem, I think that a more valuable 
> experiment is comparing it against another parallel filesystem, like pvfs2 or 
> lustre, in a distributed environment. This could show the performance of 
> glusterfs in its intended setting.

well then, why didn't the glusterfs developers do that?  besides, I think
I actually disagree: just as you want to show parallel scaling relative
to the same code run serially, it's valuable to show a clusterfs versus
a single-node running a fs not specifically designed for scaling.

actually, that's another point: the comparison should have been normalized
by the number of bricks involved, since linear scaling of aggregate bandwidth
of separate nodes writing separate files to separate bricks is, well, merely
expected.  might as well compare versus 16 separate NFS servers which happen
to share a namespace by being automounted into a tree ;)

but really, I'm not trying to be down on glusterfs.  it seems fine, though 
I'm not really clear on what its goals are (against any of the other cluster
fs's).