Saturday, September 29, 2007

MogileFS revisited

So i got this reply on my recent post

"Please recall that MogileFS has no POSIX file API. All file transfers
are done via HTTP. So, it really isn't a drop-in replacement for NFS
or any other network file system. You need to add logic to your
application to deal with MogileFS.

Also, you can't do updates to a file; you must overwrite the entire
file if you make any changes.

MogileFS is primarily intended for a write-once/read-many setup."

So how would this fit in our system, for a starter I think it won't be of much impact, since we are storing system images. The idea of updating files won't be an issue, as images intend to be very large, and once stored it is either replaced by a newer image or used to restore a system. Also we are going to use Ruby on Rails to interface with the system Imager, our ope source imaging system, and ruby has a plugin for MogilrFS, so it won't be a problem to integrate it, and everything seems ok.

What about other systems, how could be MogileFS useful in other systems.. Would these issues be a problem for application in need for a smart storage? Lets take a Mail system for example, we have multiple servers serving a domain, and users' mail boxes are spread among these servers, The file in this case will be the emails, and since we need no update on the emails, write once/read many condition will be fulfilled. Although if the mail service was not tailored made or customized, it will be hard to integrate MogileFS, meaning if you are using a ready made Mail server like Sendmail or Qmail, you will find difficulties to make MogileFS your storage engine.

As a conclusion MogileFS is better used with applications that are developed with MogileFS as its storage engine in mind. Although you can use it with out of the box systems, it won't be smooth ride, but fr sure there are some systems which will not benefit from MogileFS like file sharing or workflow systems.
Still I can't wait to try it over, and keeping you updated.

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