I would like to have a scalable storage system as backed for web servers serving php/HTML.
I was looking at glusterfs, that seems rather stable.
My question is, does it really scale? Can I think to host a lot of loaded website on the top of glusterfs? Or these are just dreams? If you have any better alternative please suggest.
MySQL will use its own storage.
If there's anything Gluster does - it is scale. Linearly and pretty much infinitely.
from the official website
GlusterFs is for sure a good option, latest version ( 3.4 ) now has improved self healing functions. If you want to give it a try, it looks very promising having glusterfs on top of zfs.
Zfs now is available as fuse or kernel native module for linux and it can substitute xfs + lvm, giving a robust and scalable fs for your data nodes. Moreover as a bonus you can enable data compression and data deduplication at a price of some performance and ram.