[TriLUG] Compuverde - HA SMB and NFS

[Ron Kelley via TriLUG]

Thought I would share this with the TriLUG team.

I have been playing with Compuverde tool (https://compuverde.com) with some good success thus far.  This is a software-defined storage (SDS) NFS/SMB system built on Linux with pretty good HA.  Similar to other SDS products, you can add any x86 server into the cluster with spinning or SSD drives.  Once the cluster is operational, you can setup virtual volumes and share them out to the world. You can add or remove any node from the cluster (or add/remove drives from any node) during run-time operation.


A few cool features:
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* HA NFS.  Simply setup an NFS export(1), map it to your host via IP, reboot the node holding the IP, and the system automatically switches over to one of the other nodes.  I have been looking for this product for a while - seems it finally arrived.

* Virtual volumes.  Create a new virtual volume via the GUI (NFS or SMB) and map it to your hosts - on the fly.

* The back-end supports a few data replication types - mirroring, RAID-5, RAID-6, etc.  Unlike other products that consume 50% of raw space due to mirroring, this tool maximizes storage capacity.

* The tool is FREE TO USE for non-production systems - up to 20TB capacity

All that said, the documentation is rather sparse (they mainly rely on youtube tutorial videos), and the GUI is not intuitive.  Plus, the free version requires a boot drive, a "cache" drive, and a "datastore" drive.  If you just want all spinning (or all SSD) drives, you must purchase a license.


All in all, not a bad product.  With some GUI polishing, this could be a killer SDS product.


-Ron


(1) Setting up the NFS export is easier said than done.  It took me 30mins of hunting things down in the GUI to understand how they are doing things.