[Beowulf] Size of GlusterFS installations? Hints? Alternatives?

[Steffen Grunewald]

I'm looking into GlusterFS to store data on a cluster (amd64, Debian Etch)
in a distributed way with redundancy (kind of RAID-1, two nodes mirroring
each other). Each node has a dedicated harddisk which can be used for data
storage, and I'm still free to decide which FS to choose.
For easier recovery I'd prefer not to split files across nodes (typical 
size ~ a few MB).

Would GlusterFS be suited for such a task?
Would it scale to a couple of hundreds of disk "pairs"?
Which underlying filesystem should I choose?

Since I'm using my own "homegrown" kernel, which modules would I have to
build - is it mandatory to use the patched version of fuse?

Any suggestions for the stack of translators (and their order therein)?
How to best organize redundancy? (since I don't have it in hardware, and
I can get hold of "missing" files *if* I know their names, this should
be not too hard?)

Any alternatives? (as fas as I know, e.g. Lustre doesn't have redundancy
features...)


Cheers,
 Steffen