New features:
- Volume Snapshots
Distributed lvm thin-pool based snapshots for backing up volumes
in a Gluster Trusted Storage Pool. Apart from providing cluster
wide co-ordination to trigger a consistent snapshot, several
improvements have been performed through the GlusterFS stack to
make translators more crash consistent. Snapshotting of volumes is
tightly coupled with lvm today but one could also enhance the same
framework to integrate with a backend storage technology like btrfs
that can perform snapshots.
- Erasure Coding
Xavier Hernandez from Datalab added support to perform erasure
coding of data in a GlusterFS volume across nodes in a Trusted
Storage Pool. Erasure Coding requires fewer nodes to provide better
redundancy than a n-way replicated volume and can help in reducing
the overall deployment cost. We look forward to build on this
foundation and deliver more enhancememnts in upcoming releases.
- Better SSL support
Multiple improvements to SSL support in GlusterFS. The GlusterFS
driver in OpenStack Manila that provides certificate based access
to tenants relies on these improvements.
- Meta translator
This translator provides a /proc like view for examining internal
state of translators on the client stack of a GlusterFS volume and
certainly looks like an interface that I would be heavily consuming
for introspection of GlusterFS.
- Automatic File Replication (AFR) v2
A significant re-factor of the synchronous replication translator,
provides granular entry self-healing and reduced resource consumption
with entry self-heals.
- NetBSD, OSX and FreeBSD ports
Lot of fixes on the portability front. The NetBSD port passes most
regression tests as of 3.6.0. At this point, none of these ports
are ready to be deployed in production. However, with dedicated
maintainers for each of these ports, we expect to reach production
readiness on these platforms in a future release.
Complete releases notes are available at
https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/blob/release-3.6/doc/release-notes/3.6.0.md
Major new features according to http://www.gluster.org/
- Elastic Volume Management
- New Gluster Console Manager
- Dynamic Storage for the data center and cloud
