In this blog post series, I want to take a closer look at a storage technology called Gluster File System, and how it can be set up (this article), connected to (article #2) and expand storage (article #3). This is the first blog post of the series and I will review what GlusterFS is, why you would consider using it, and how to deploy it using the GoGrid GlusterFS Partner GSI.

GoGrid offers a great storage solution called Cloud Storage. But what if you want to deploy your own storage so that you can directly control performance and redundancy? What software would you use to provide this? The simple answer is Gluster. It is a powerful software-based storage solution that offers a centralized controlled storage pool management system that is very easy to use.

There are many different ways to take advantage of the GlusterFS storage solution. (Note: in the descriptions below a “brick” is a GoGrid Virtual Server.)

1. Distributed Volumes:

“Distributed volumes distribute files throughout the bricks in the volume. You can use distributed volumes where the requirement is to scale storage and the redundancy is either not important or is provided by other hardware/software layers.” – Gluster.org

2. Replicated Volumes:

“Replicated volumes replicate files throughout the bricks in the volume. You can use replicated volumes in environments where high-availability and high-reliability are critical.” – Gluster.org

3. Striped Volumes:

“Stripes data across bricks in the volume. For best results, you should use striped volumes only in high concurrency environments accessing very large files.”

These storage volume options seem very familiar, don’t they? Well, if you are familiar with the different RAID configurations of hard drives in server deployments, you will notice similarities with these options. For example, the “Distributed Volume” for Gluster is essentially a RAID 0. You sacrifice redundancy to gain superior performance and ease of capacity scaling.

The Replicated Volume is similar to a RAID 10 or RAID 1 where data integrity, redundancy and reliability are very important. However, the cost to scale is more since you need to basically add GoGrid Virtual Servers (bricks) in pairs to maintain the Replicated Volume structure.

The Striped Volume is similar to RAID 5 where data is striped across the GoGrid Virtual Servers (bricks). This comes in very handy when you are dealing with very large files (multiple GB files) and when the file is accessed multiple servers will stream the data to the web-server needing the file – offering very fast reads.

For my blog post, I am going to configure a 4 server Distributed Volume Gluster setup using the GoGrid Gluster Partner Image. I am going to deploy 4 x 8GB Gluster servers. Each Gluster server will have 384GB of storage available. In the Distributed Volume setup (similar to RAID 10), I will have 384GB x2 worth of space equaling approximately 768GB of usable space.

First step is to deploy the 4 new GoGrid Gluster Virtual Servers using the GoGrid Partner GSI. I log into my portal and then follow the next steps:

1. Click “Add”

2. Choose “Cloud Server”

3. Filter for “Gluster” & choose that image

4. Accept the Terms

5. Fill in the server information (name, public IP, description, memory allotment)

6. Repeat this process 3 more time but using different server name and public IP address.

Once you have all 4 of your new Gluster servers deployed, you can then view the Support → Passwords page in your portal to find the login information. With this login information, you can run this command from your local Linux workstation to change the hostname, set the private IP address and reboot each system. Run the following Bash script from your Linux workstation. The script will prompt you for the server address and root login, and also ask for the hostname and private IP address/netmask you want to use. If you don’t want to use this script, simply log into each system manually, update the host names and private IP addresses, and then reboot.

https://github.com/sepulworld/Remote_Linux_System_Update/blob/master/system_update.sh

I should now be able to log into all 4 systems and see the appropriate hostnames and IPs on each.

This looks good – if you don’t see the right hostnames or IPs on one or more of the systems, double check what is configured in the /etc/sysconfig/network file and in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 file. Also, confirm if your host performed the intended reboot (this is necessary for the host name to update at the command line).

From one of your Gluster servers, confirm private network connectivity by pinging each of the other Gluster servers via their private IP addresses. See image below.

Once this has been confirmed, we can take a look and see if the Gluster process is already running. It is configured on this GoGrid Partner Image to start on boot.

Now I need to configure the trusted server storage pool. Basically, I log into just one of my 4 Gluster servers (I choose Gluster_1) and I run a single command to put each of the other 3 members into the trusted server storage pool.

[root@Gluster_1 ~]# gluster peer probe 10.129.151.107

See image here -

Next, I run the command to create the distributed volume using my 4 Gluster servers.

command: gluster volume create DataStore1 replica 4 transport tcp 10.129.151.105:/store1 10.129.151.98:/store2 10.129.151.108:/store3 10.129.151.107:/store4

You can name the directories anything you want. I used “store1” thru “store4”. You can also name the volume whatever you would like. I choose DataStore1.

Now let’s start the Volume with one simple command: gluster volume start DataStore1

And finally let’s view the volume information: gluster volume info DataStore1

Helpful link:

http://gluster.com/community/documentation/index.php/Main_Page

If you run into any issues or have questions about the Gluster Partner GSI, please email gogrid-beta@gluster.com

That is it! You have successfully deployed the GoGrid Gluster servers from the GoGrid Partner GSI and configured 4 of them in a new replicated storage volume. My next blog post will cover deploying a web-server and connecting to this new storage volume. The third and final post will cover how to scale your replicated storage volume on GoGrid.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful. Stay tuned for Parts 2 and 3. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Last time in the GoGrid Cloud Survey Report series, I wrote on cloud use cases and reasons for migrating to the cloud. This week, I wanted to focus on everybody’s favorite topic: security and compliance in the cloud.

If you’re brand new to this series, let me catch you up to speed. At the beginning of the year, GoGrid gathered feedback from over 500 CTOs, developers and IT professionals relating to cloud computing and best practices. This week, we’re highlighting the results from the question “What type of security/compliance do you require in the cloud?”

You may have noticed, whenever there is a conversation about Infrastructure-as-a-Service, the security debate is sure to follow. We wanted to see what types of security the IT industry uses and which were the most important to maintaining compliance.

What Type of Security/Compliance Do You Require in the Cloud?

As seen in the chart above, private VLANs, network layer firewalls and DDoS mitigation are the most required form of security according to our respondents, followed closely by Virtual Private Networks.

Obviously, security is only as good as the amount of effort that you put into implementing it. At GoGrid, we believe that providing raw infrastructure that you can control and manage is paramount. And, we provide the tools to help make your environment more secure. Private VLANs enable traffic to flow between your server instances that is not public in any way to other users of the public cloud. We launched with this service and believe that is should be core to any cloud. DDoS protection is something that most web infrastructure providers and hosters have built into their service offering. No site is 100% immune to Distributed Denial of Service attacks, however, attacks can be thwarted and mitigated. Also, GoGrid provides firewall services either via a hardware appliance or via a Partner GoGrid Server Image (PGSI) – like CloudPassage, Gazzang, Cranium Solutions, Sentrigo, Trend Micro, Art of Defence or CohesiveFT (for VPN solutions), among others, where GoGrid users can choose best-of-class server image solutions to further harden and monitor their GoGrid environments.

PCI compliance is very business-specific. While GoGrid does not offer full PCI-compliance, we can provide the tools to “get you down the path” of achieving PCI-compliance. One example is via our hybrid hosting offering. By mixing and matching physical and virtual environments, you can work to achieve compliance of certain aspects of your hosted environment. Also, some of the partner images in the GoGrid Exchange offer means to achieve compliance for particular components of the PCI-compliance checklist – for example IDS/IPS, logging and web application firewalls. Our account teams have assisted many GoGrid customers in achieving PCI or HIPAA compliance.

Security/Compliance Requirements (Grouped)

This graph took the same data from above and really highlights what the IT industry views as important for IaaS security requirements. One of the reasons HIPAA and PCI are low are because is is very specific to a business vertical. Since many of the respondents may not have a need for PCI compliance, they will mark it as a lower of a priority than more commonplace items like firewalls, Private VLANs and VPNs which most companies should use as part of their Security Best Practices implementations.

Now that you know the security requirements from over 500 professionals from the IT industry, how do you stack up? Is your infrastructure more or less secure than our respondents? Stay tuned to the GoGrid Cloud Survey Report series because next time we’ll be diving into the private cloud!

For more information on our survey methodology or to see all of our results, please download the Cloud Survey Report.

On May 25th, GoGrid and partner Equinix will be educating you on why we call 2011 the “Year of the Hosted Private Cloud.” If you are doing business that requires technology, in order to increase profitability and productivity, you frequently need to lower your total cost of ownership of that technology. Cloud Computing has been great for this as we see with the 10s of thousands of active GoGrid customers currently. As corporations and enterprises expand their technology footprints, they need to carefully weigh the various infrastructure solutions available to them. But be forewarned, some of the antiquated options are expensive and can consume huge amounts of human capital in the process. For many, a Hosted Private Cloud is a much better option.

While public clouds offer incredible advantages over traditional, dare I say, old fashioned (physical) infrastructure implementations, sometimes corporations need to be able to leverage the benefits and technology of a state-of-the-art public cloud, but within a non-shared environment. This is where GoGrid’s Hosted Private Cloud comes in to play.

On Wednesday, May 25th from 11:00am to 11:30am PST, GoGrid and Equinix will be providing an educational webinar to discuss a variety of topics surrounding public and private clouds, including:

• Distinguishing between a Public vs. Hosted Private Cloud
• Determining which type of cloud is right for your business
• How enterprises are leveraging the private cloud

Additionally, the webinar will provide attendees various Resources on how to get started as well as answer questions from the audience.

Panelists for this webinar are:

• Lou Najzdin – Lou is a Subject Matter Expert with Equinix’s Cloud and IT Services vertical. In this role Lou consults with both Cloud companies and Enterprises on deploying and utilizing cloud technologies. Lou is in the unique position to see Cloud the subject from both the provider and user perspectives.
• Mario Olivarez – Mario is GoGrid’s Vice President of Product Management and leads all aspects of product strategy, development and execution; including product roadmap planning and management, product marketing initiatives and is a key member of the executive team that took GoGrid to market.

Register now at: http://go.gogrid.com/equinix

Some pretty big things are happening at GoGrid. Today we announced the release of our Image Rights Management (IRM) service for GoGrid Partners, a very powerful technology that assists with the software and licensing management in the cloud, specifically within the GoGrid Exchange. As many of you may know, GoGrid Exchange is a catalogue of software server images and solutions from Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that are available on-demand for those who use GoGrid cloud infrastructure. IRM adds several benefits for ISVs and, in turn, customers.

To better explain IRM technology and why it is so important, I sat down with Raja Srinivasan, VP of Cloud Computing at Zeus Technologies, and our very own Paul Lancaster, Manager of Cloud Ecosystems at GoGrid. They discuss how IRM is the solution to licensing software in the cloud and what the GoGrid Exchange means for partners and customers.

Raja and Paul highlight many of the benefits of the GoGrid Exchange as well as focus on our new IRM technology. They break them down into two main areas.

Benefits for Partners:

• License Management – IRM technology automatically verifies if the software is correctly licensed to run within the GoGrid cloud, and will automatically take pre-defined actions should the licensing be invalid.
• Software Management – Simply update your software on the GoGrid Exchange and it is automatically made available to your customers.
• Easier to Deliver Support – When a customer has a support need, the ISV can quickly understand exactly what kind of infrastructure the software is running on so they can identify the support issue faster.
• Easy Payments – GoGrid handles the invoicing of customers for both Partner Image licensing and infrastructure usage, and then pays the Partner for the Partner Service Image usage.

Benefits for GoGrid Customers:

• Single-Button Install – Customers can find the software solution they want on exchange.gogrid.com and instantly install it with little to no configuration.
• Software Management – Users are automatically kept up to date with the latest versions of the software they installed from the Exchange.
• Unified Invoicing – GoGrid handles the billing for Exchange Partner server images as well as infrastructure costs within a single invoice. Customers can manage their software and infrastructure payments from a single portal on a single bill.
• Flexibility & Scalability – the GoGrid Exchange allows customers to get the software they want when they want it. Also, customers aren’t locked into any multi-year licensing deals. The Exchange makes software solutions in the cloud highly efficient and ready to scale with your company.

We’re very excited about the release of IRM what this means for our customers and the cloud computing industry.

For more information, please read our Press Release titled “GoGrid Enhances Partner Exchange Platform with New Image Rights Management Technology” which is available in the Press Release section of the GoGrid site.

For more information, please visit http://exchange.gogrid.com

We recently hosted a joint webinar with Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu project, and discussed Ubuntu in the GoGrid cloud. I had the privilege of hosting this webinar with Nick Barcet, Canonical Cloud Solution Lead, and Zane Williamson, GoGrid Key Accounts System Administrator.

This webinar focuses on the relationship between Ubuntu and cloud infrastructure, how open-source software is fueling innovation and some examples of an Ubuntu environment on GoGrid.

If you weren’t able to make the live webinar, don’t worry because we recorded and it’s available on demand!

This is a really educational webinar that covers a lot of content. Ubuntu in the GoGrid cloud discusses the following topics:

• An overview of the cloud landscape
• A Ubuntu retrospective
• Ubuntu server adoption statistics
• Benefits of Ubuntu in the GoGrid Cloud
• Use cases – applications best suited for Ubuntu
• Q&A

Whether you’re a Linux expert or just getting started with open-source software, we’re sure you’ll enjoy this recorded webinar.

Click here to view the webinar.