On 9/14/07, Jeff Garzik [off-list ref] wrote:

Evgeniy Polyakov wrote:

quoted

Hi.

I'm pleased to announce fourth release of the distributed storage
subsystem, which allows to form a storage on top of remote and local
nodes, which in turn can be exported to another storage as a node to
form tree-like storages.

This release includes new configuration interface (kernel connector over
netlink socket) and number of fixes of various bugs found during move
to it (in error path).

Further TODO list includes:
* implement optional saving of mirroring/linear information on the remote
      nodes (simple)
* new redundancy algorithm (complex)
* some thoughts about distributed filesystem tightly connected to DST
      (far-far planes so far)

Homepage:
http://tservice.net.ru/~s0mbre/old/?section=projects&item=dst

Signed-off-by: Evgeniy Polyakov <redacted>

My thoughts.  But first a disclaimer:   Perhaps you will recall me as
one of the people who really reads all your patches, and examines your
code and proposals closely.  So, with that in mind...

I question the value of distributed block services (DBS), whether its
your version or the others out there.  DBS are not very useful, because
it still relies on a useful filesystem sitting on top of the DBS.  It
devolves into one of two cases:  (1) multi-path much like today's SCSI,
with distributed filesystem arbitrarion to ensure coherency, or (2) the
filesystem running on top of the DBS is on a single host, and thus, a
single point of failure (SPOF).

This distributed storage is very much needed; even if it were to act
as a more capable/performant replacement for NBD (or MD+NBD) in the
near term.  Many high availability applications don't _need_ all the
additional complexity of a full distributed filesystem.  So given
that, its discouraging to see you trying to gently push Evgeniy away
from all the promising work he has published.

Evgeniy, please continue your current work.

Mike