GlusterFS usage in ComunIP VoIP clusters

GlusterFS is an open source clustered file system capable of scaling to several petabytes and handling thousands of clients. GlusterFS clusters together storage building blocks, aggregating disk and memory resources and managing data in a single global namespace.

A key advantage is the GlusterFS modular architecture that allows modules to be stacked to match user requirements. You can use GlusterFS to quickly configure a standalone server system and later expand the system as your needs grow. GlusterFS includes a configuration utility to handle standard workloads.

GlusterFS substitutes expensive SANs in VoIP clusters

ComunIP uses GlusterFS for building High-Availability (HA) VoIP server infrastructure. Instead of invest money buying expensive hardware-based SAN solutions, this approach provides the same service level agreement for a far more accessible price.

GlusterFS reduces the deployment work and the time of crash recovering when compared to common Linux DR:BD solutions. The good part in using GlusterFS is that some complex problems can be solved in a very simple manner, for example, to share the same PHP sessions between several machines to improve processing scalability, with no need of managing/mapping a SAN for the work. By using the replicate translator, if some machine crashes, any other available machine is able to continue to process the new requests from the users transparently.

ComunIP Linux VMware Appliance for Clusters uses GlusterFS

ComunIP created its own optimized Linux distribution based on Gentoo Linux (kernel 2.6.30), and distributes it embedded in VMware appliances, carrying on the latest Gluster Filesystem version available. The distributed VoIP server environment generally uses a simple Gigabit Ethernet back-end network to provide service for thousands of users simultaneously. The hard disk technology used is SATA based for the best cost-benefit solution. To increase the reading performance (as the writing process is always less than the reading one) and improve the realibility of each individual machine, it is used the Linux software-based RAID-10.

Software-based clusters benefits for VoIP environments

The software-based approach to build clusters simplifies the acquisition and upgrade of the environment, and gives to customers a very reliable system. When you acquire a conventional hardware-based cluster, whenever a machine needs to be changed or you need to grow up your server farm, generally you have to buy another machine from the same vendor and brand. By using GlusterFS and ComunIP VoIP infrastructure, you can change your servers gradually.