From: Johnny Hughes johnny@centos.org
We use glusterfs in the CentOS build infrastructure ... and for the most part it works fairly well. It is sometimes very slow on file systems with lots of small files ... especially for operations like find or chmod/chown on a large volume with lots of small files. BUT, that said, it is very convenient to use commodity hardware and have redundant, large, failover volumes on the local network. We started with version 3.2.5 and now use 3.3.0-3, which is faster than 3.2.5 ... so it should get better in the future. I can recommend glusterfs as I have not found anything that does what it does and does it better, but it is challenging and may not be good for all situations, so test it before you use it.
I am not too worried about bad performances. I am afraid to get paged one night because the 50+ TB of the storage cluster are gone followinf a bug/crash... It would take days/weeks to set it back up from the backups. If we were rich, I guess we would have two (or more) "geo-replicated" glusters and be able to withstand one failing... I would like the same trust level that I have in RAID.
JD