[sheepdog] [ANNOUNCE] Sheepdog 0.5.0 released

[MORITA Kazutaka]

Hi all,

I'm pleased to announce the availability of the 0.5.0 release.
The software is available from GitHub:
 https://github.com/collie/sheepdog/archives/master

Major features include:

 - manual object recovery

   We can disable automatic data recovery with
   'collie cluster recover disable'.  This is useful, for example,
   when you reboot a storage node for maintenance and don't want to
   run data recovery during the time.

 - incremental backups of VDIs

   This release adds two commands 'vdi backup' and 'vdi restore' to
   collie.  With these commands, you can create incremental backup
   files between snapshots.  It is useful to reduce backup data size.

 - testing framework

   We add a xfstests-style test suite in this release.  With this
   framework, we've fixed a lot of bugs and I believe sheepdog becomes
   much stable.

 - set virtual node numbers based on free disk spaces

   With this feature, even if sheepdog cluster doesn't have the same
   sized disks, sheeps can ideally balance objects.

 - reimplement farm over plain store driver

   The previous implementation of farm has a problem that sheep blocks
   I/O long time during object recovery.  This fixes it completely and
   makes farm implementation much simpler.

 - sheepdog disk cache

   This is yet another write cache implementation.  With this feature,
   Sheepdog shows a good performance when the number of nodes is not
   big (less than 10 nodes).


Enjoy!

Thanks,

Kazutaka