Cisco Cloud Object Storage (COS) provides distributed, resilient, high-performance storage and retrieval of binary large object (blob) data. Object storage is distributed across a cluster of hardware systems, or nodes. The storage cluster is resilient against hard drive failure within a node and against node failure within a cluster. Nodes can be added to or removed from the cluster to adjust cluster capacity as needed.
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Red Hat Gluster Storage
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Red Hat Gluster Storage is a software-defined storage option; Red Hat acquired Gluster in 2011.
Cisco Cloud Object [Storage's] primary objective is to offer a secure, standard, and professional storage space, for the content that the company has. Further, Cisco Cloud Object Storage makes the access and the [sharing] of every detail efficient and remarkable. Again, the monitoring and overseeing of the database from Cisco Cloud Object Storage is [progress] that the developer established. Finally, the application [enhances] data migration, an effective way of managing content.
GFS is well suited for DEVOPS type environments where organizations prefer to invest in servers and DAS (direct attached storage) versus purchasing storage solutions/appliances. GFS allows organizations to scale their storage capacity at a fraction of the price using DAS HDDs versus committing to purchase licenses and hardware from a dedicated storage manufacturer (e.g. NetApp, Dell/EMC, HP, etc.).
Scales; bricks can be easily added to increase storage capacity
Performs; I/O is spread across multiple spindles (HDDs), thereby increasing read and write performance
Integrates well with RHEL/CentOS 7; if your organization is using RHEL 7, Gluster (GFS) integrates extremely well with that baseline, especially since it's come under the Red Hat portfolio of tools.
Documentation; using readthedocs demonstrates that the Gluster project isn't always kept up-to-date as far as documentation is concerned. Many of the guides are for previous versions of the product and can be cumbersome to follow at times.
Self-healing; our use of GFS required the administrator to trigger an auto-heal operation manually whenever bricks were added/removed from the pool. This would be a great feature to incorporate using autonomous self-healing whenever a brick is added/removed from the pool.
Performance metrics are scarce; our team received feedback that online RDBMS transactions did not perform well on distributed file systems (such as GFS), however this could not be substantiated via any online research or white papers.
Cisco Cloud Object Storage (COS) stands out in terms of scalability, reliability, and security. Even the storage plans are competitive with other cloud object storage providers. It provides great performance for unstructured data and large datasets, which are highly used in industries requiring analyses of large datasets. For an efficient user experience, it also provides content delivery for the users spanning across the globe.
Gluster is a lot lower cost than the storage industry leaders. However, NetApp and Dell/EMC's product documentation is (IMHO) more mature and hardened against usage in operational scenarios and environments. Using Gluster avoids "vendor lock-in" from the perspective on now having to purchase dedicated hardware and licenses to run it. Albeit, should an organization choose to pay for support for Gluster, they would be paying licensing costs to Red Hat instead of NetApp, Dell, EMC, HP, or VMware. It could be assumed, however, that if an organization wanted to use Gluster, that they were already a Linux shop and potentially already paying Red Hat or Canonical (Debian) for product support, thereby the use of GFS would be a nominal cost adder from a maintenance/training perspective.
