I was asking recently about options for divvying up access to file servers, as we have a NAS solution that gets fairly bogged down when our users (with giant profiles, especially) all log in nearly simultaneously. I ran across Gluster and it looks like it can cluster different physical storage media into a single virtual volume and share it out like a virtual NAS from the client perspective and it support CIFS.

My question is whether something like this would be feasible to use for home and profile directories in an active directory environment.

I was worried about ACL's, primarily, as I didn't think CIFS was fine-grained enough to support NTFS permissions and it didn't look like Gluster exports those permission levels, just the base permissions for basic file sharing.

I got the impression that using Gluster would allow for data to be redundant across multiple servers and would speed up access to the files under heavy load, while allowing us to dynamically boost storage capacity by just adding another server and telling Gluster's master node to add that server. Maybe I'm wrong with my understanding of it though. Anyone else use it or care to share how feasible this is?