Sharing a filesystem across multiple machines – cluster or distribute?

When you start using technologies such as load balancers and clustering software, you often end up in a situation where you need the same files on multiple servers. While you could simply copy the files, what if you could mount the files on each of the servers, sharing the filesystem across the systems without the SPOF that an NFS server introduces? One of the easiest ways to do this is to use Gluster.

Gluster, also known as GlusterFS, is an open source distributed filesystem that provides scalable and flexible storage for large volumes of data. Initially developed by Gluster Inc., it is now maintained by the open source community. Gluster uses a distributed architecture to create a single and unified filesystem that can span across multiple servers and storage devices. This approach allows you to aggregate the storage capacity of multiple servers and present it as a single, well-structured filesystem...