Gluster vs Hadoop Distributed File System

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.

Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is the primary distributed storage used by Hadoop applications. Its clusters use a NameNode to manage filesystem metadata and DataNodes to store data. HDFS is designed for fault tolerance on commodity hardware and high-throughput streaming access and batch processing, not low latency. It is tuned for files from gigabytes to terabytes, clusters with hundreds of nodes, and tens of millions of files in one instance. Administration includes shell-like commands, NameNode and DataNode web servers, fsck diagnostics, safemode, and a cluster balancer. Its permissions model shares much with POSIX and can optionally use POSIX ACLs; authentication supports simple operating-system identity or Kerberos. Configured encryption protects data at rest and in transit using encryption zones and the Hadoop Key Management Server. WebHDFS provides a REST API, and listed storage integrations include Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Lake Storage, and Tencent COS. HDFS is free to use under Apache License 2.0, with self-hosted cluster deployment.