[ale] Distributed filesystems?

[Allen Beddingfield]

Wondering if any of you have experience with distributed filesystems, such as CEPH, GlusterFS, MooseFS, etc...?
We've been using SUSE's "SUSE Enterprise Storage" package, which is CEPH, packaged with a Salt installer, and their UI.  Anyway, it worked well, but was sort of like using a cement block to smash a fly for our purposes.   
SUSE notified us yesterday that they are getting out of that business, and will EOL the product in two years.   I'm glad they let us know BEFORE we renewed the maintenance in May.
That really wasn't that big of a deal for us, because we were about to do a clean slate re-install/hardware refresh, anyway.  
Sooo....  
I'm looking into MooseFS and GlusterFS at this point, as they are much simpler to deploy and manage (at least to me) compared with CEPH.  Do any of you have experiences with these?  Thoughts?
The use case is to use CHEAP (think lots of servers full of 10TB SATA drives and 1.2TB SAS drives) hardware to share out big NFS (or native client) shares as temporary/scratch space, where performance isn't that important.

Allen B.
--
Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
Office of Information Technology
The University of Alabama
Office 205-348-2251
allen at ua.edu