Sharing storage between servers
- by El Yobo
I have a PHP based web application which is currently only using one webserver but will shortly be scaling up to another. In most regards this is pretty straightforward, but the application also stores a lot of files on the filesystem. It seems that there are many approaches to sharing the files between the two servers, from the very simple to the reasonably complex.
These are the options that I'm aware of
Simple network storage
NFS
SMB/CIFS
Clustered filesystems
Lustre
GFS/GFS2
GlusterFS
Hadoop DFS
MogileFS
What I want is for a file uploaded via one webserver be immediately available if accessed through the other. The data is extremely important and absolutely cannot be lost, so whatever is implemented needs to a) never lose data and b) have very high availability (as good as, or better, than a local filesystem).
It seems like the clustered filesystems will also provide faster data access than local storage (for large files) but that isn't of vita importance at the moment.
What would you recommend? Do you have any suggestions to add or anything specifically to look out for with the above options? Any suggestions on how to manage backup of data on the clustered filesystems?
