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10.12. Non Uniform File Allocation (NUFA)

Important

Non Uniform File Allocation (NUFA) is a technology preview feature. Technology preview features are not fully supported under Red Hat subscription level agreements (SLAs), may not be functionally complete, and are not intended for production use. However, these features provide early access to upcoming product innovations, enabling customers to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process. As Red Hat considers making future iterations of technology preview features generally available, we will provide commercially reasonable support to resolve any reported issues that customers experience when using these features. Red Hat Gluster Storage currently does not support NFSv4 delegations, Multi-head NFS and High Availability. These will be added in the upcoming releases of Red Hat Gluster Storage nfs-ganesha. It is not a feature recommended for production deployment in its current form. However, Red Hat Gluster Storage volumes can be exported via nfs-ganesha for consumption by both NFSv3 and NFSv4 clients.
When a client on a server creates files, the files are allocated to a brick in the volume based on the file name. This allocation may not be ideal, as there is higher latency and unnecessary network traffic for read/write operations to a non-local brick or export directory. NUFA ensures that the files are created in the local export directory of the server, and as a result, reduces latency and conserves bandwidth for that server accessing that file. This can also be useful for applications running on mount points on the storage server.
If the local brick runs out of space or reaches the minimum disk free limit, instead of allocating files to the local brick, NUFA distributes files to other bricks in the same volume if there is space available on those bricks.
NUFA should be enabled before creating any data in the volume. To enable NUFA, execute gluster volume set VOLNAMEcluster.nufa enableon.

Important

NUFA is supported under the following conditions:
  • Volumes with only with one brick per server.
  • For use with a FUSE client. NUFA is not supported with NFS or SMB.
  • A client that is mounting a NUFA-enabled volume must be present within the trusted storage pool.