Chapter 2. Architecture and Concepts
This chapter provides an overview of Red Hat Gluster Storage architecture and Storage concepts.
2.1. Architecture
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.
Figure 2.1. Red Hat Gluster Storage Architecture
