Secure storage with GlusterFS

Recently I had a CPU cache memory error pop up in my file server logfile (Figure 1). I don't know if that means the CPU is failing, or if it got hit by a cosmic ray, or if something else happened, but now I wonder: Can I really trust this hardware with critical services anymore? When it comes to servers, the failure of a single component, or even a single system, should not take out an entire service.

Figure 1: A CPU hardware error.

In other words, I'm doing it wrong by relying on a single server to provide my file-serving needs. Even though I have the disks configured in a mirrored RAID array, this won't help if the CPU goes flaky and dies; I'll still have to build a new server, and move the drives over, and hope that no data was corrupted. Now imagine that this isn't my personal file server but the back-end file server for your system boot images and partitions (because you're using KVM, RHEV, OpenStack, or something similar). In this case, the failure of a single server could bring a significant portion of your infrastructure to its knees. Thus, the availability aspect of the security triad (i.e., Availability, Integrity, and Confidentiality, or AIC) was not properly addressed, and now you have to deal with a lot of angry users and managers.

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