Chapter 2. Architecture and Concepts

At the core of the Red Hat Gluster Storage design is a completely new method of architecting storage. The result is a system that has immense scalability, is highly resilient, and offers extraordinary performance.

In a scale-out system, one of the biggest challenges is keeping track of the logical and physical locations of data and metadata. Most distributed systems solve this problem by creating a metadata server to track the location of data and metadata. As traditional systems add more files, more servers, or more disks, the central metadata server becomes a performance bottleneck, as well as a central point of failure.

Unlike other traditional storage solutions, Red Hat Gluster Storage does not need a metadata server, and locates files algorithmically using an elastic hashing algorithm. This no-metadata server architecture ensures better performance, linear scalability, and reliability.