Basho is a GoGrid partner and responsible for the open-source Riak project. If you are not familiar with Riak, it is a well regarded open-source distributed database. It was built off of the Dynamo concept so it is often compared to Cassandra and Amazon Dynamo DB.
Riak is used as a fast, fault-tolerant distributed database. Companies like Mozilla use it for storing and analyzing beta testing results. Mozilla needed a solution to help improve the user experience and that would allow them to store large amounts of data very quickly. Another example of a company using Riak is Bump which uses Riak to scale and manage massive amounts of data sent between it’s millions of users. Riak is used to store elements of past user conversations so that communication history is readily accessible to users.
Basho Riak version 1.1.4 is now available as a GoGrid Community Server Image (CGSI). You can find it when you launch a virtual machine and search for “Riak”. This image is available in all our data centers. This CGSI contains the open source version so support is only available via the community site and will not have all the features present in the Enterprise version. However, you can use this image to either run a proof of concept (POC) of Riak to see if it will meet your needs or to run a small cluster. These will run on GoGrid’s high performance VMs which have been shown to have significant performance advantages over other cloud implementations.
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
The GoGrid newsletter went out today. Unfortunately, if you are not already a GoGrid customer, you didn’t receive it…until now! There are a lot of exciting items covered here (a few of which you already know if you subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed including the Edit, Delete and Restore function of MyGSIs). If you aren’t already a GoGrid user, I recommend that you sign up (and here is a quick hint, if you want a $100 GoGrid credit on new account, contact a GoGrid Sales Rep and they can consult with you on your best options for the Cloud).
Below is the entire GoGrid Newsletter (October 2009):
Hello Michael,
In this edition of the GoGrid newsletter I cover recent feature releases, planned features for the next release, and the end-of-life (EoL) of Server Images with preinstalled applications. Here are the specific topics:
Yesterday an update to GoGrid was released with the following enhancements:
Edit, Delete & Restore MyGSI Images
Updated Billing Widget
Updated GoGrid API
On August 11, 2009, we announced the availability of GoGrid 2.0 which included the new personal server images (MyGSI) functionality. Details on that important release are found here. Using MyGSI to manage your server repository or inventory is a great way to not only speed up your workflow in terms of deploying copies of servers quickly and easily, but also save money in the process (by storing your personal server images in GoGrid Cloud Storage for just a few dollars a month).
Edit, Delete & Restore MyGSI Images
As our customers were demanding this feature (MyGSIs), we got it out to market as quickly as possible. This new release now provides you with the ability to Edit, Delete and Restore MyGSIs that are located within the Server Images tab.
DELETE
Hopefully many of you are already enjoying the MyGSI feature. Here are a few things you should know about the newly pushed functionality. Within the Server Images tab, you should now see a new icon to the far right hand side of the server images that looks like a trash can:
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