Design & Architecture

This chapter explains what you can do with MooseFS — and how it all works under the hood.

To get the most out of MooseFS, it's important to understand how the system is designed and how its components interact. This chapter walks through the overall architecture of MooseFS — covering the roles of the Master Server, Chunkservers, Clients, and Metaloggers — and how they communicate to ensure data availability, redundancy, and scalability.

You'll learn how data is stored, replicated, and accessed, and how MooseFS maintains fault tolerance, handles failures, and scales across large deployments.

After reading this chapter, a data center architect or support engineer should have a complete understanding of MooseFS functionality, including:

• Operational log (oplog) mechanisms for metadata operations
• Mounting options and client interaction
• Quotas for managing storage usage
• Storage classes (SCLs) for tiered data management and replication strategies

If you're planning to design, deploy, or support a MooseFS setup, this chapter is the foundation for everything that follows.