Gluster vs Google Cloud Managed Lustre

Gluster is free, open-source distributed file-system software for Linux and self-hosted deployments. It combines disk storage from multiple servers into one global namespace, with the project describing scale to several petabytes and thousands of clients. Gluster is POSIX compatible and can use on-disk filesystems supporting extended attributes. Listed capabilities include replication, quotas, geo-replication, snapshots, bitrot detection, and erasure coding. Access options include native GlusterFS, NFS, SMB/CIFS, iSCSI, and a Swift REST API. The project describes workloads such as media streaming, data analysis, and other data- and bandwidth-intensive tasks. Capacity, performance, and availability can scale across on-premise, public-cloud, and hybrid environments, using common off-the-shelf hardware. Installation resources include source downloads and Ubuntu PPAs, while documentation covers AWS deployment, SSL, and access-control lists. The project points users to consultancies for additional support and notes that Red Hat does not support community versions.

Google Cloud Managed Lustre is a fully managed parallel file system for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing workloads. Documented uses include HPC simulations, modeling and analysis, and machine-learning training and inference. It supports throughput up to 10 TBps and storage capacity up to 84,016,000 GiB (80.1 PiB). POSIX compliance is intended to preserve compatibility with existing applications, tools, and workflows. Instances can mount to Compute Engine virtual machines and Google Kubernetes Engine clusters. The service imports data from and exports data to Cloud Storage, including incremental transfers of new or changed files; only one transfer operation per instance can run at a time. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit to and within Google Cloud. Per-instance policies define maintenance windows and exclusion periods. Capacity is provisioned, and unused provisioned capacity is billed. Pricing is from $0.06/mo; hourly rates vary by month, and monthly charges use the hourly rate and hours in that month. Files can be up to 0.5 PiB, with 20 instances maximum per project. Lustre over TCP is supported, and managed backups are not available.