This presentation should provide a brief introduction to GlusterFS as a unified, distributed storage system and how it increases reliability and scale. I’ll also show some simple use cases.

Bio:
Joe Julian is the Senior Systems Administrator for Ed Wyse & Co, Inc., father of 2, GlusterFS expert and board member, and all around cool guy. You’re can find hin on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, or via IRC on irc.freenode.net #gluster where he’s often hanging out and helping people.

Since starting with Ed Wyse in 2006, he has moved their 26 locations off of dedicated frame relay connections and on to DSL or cable based VPN connections saving the company a substantial amount of money. He also cut down the 4 or 5 phone lines at each location to 1 and instead installed and configured FreeSWITCH to be an internal VoIP PBX. He extends the life of equipment by adding redundancy and finding low-cost solutions to extend functionality, such as using MyBookWorld NAS drives to become NFS root drives for what would have been too-small thin clients. He likes to find new and innovative ways to use assets to improve service and offer new services. Ed Wyse as a company strives to meet their customers expectations 100% of the time with the best system availability in their industry. GlusterFS helps them meet that expectation by reducing their exposure to single points of failure by spreading file availability across a triple redundancy pool of servers as well as disks.

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As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.