Gluster Community Expands to Drive Open Software-Defined Storage Innovation

May 5, 2013 - PRLog -- DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Red Hat, Inc. , the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Gluster Community, a Red Hat-sponsored community, has extended its charter from a single project to a multi-project open source community for open software-defined storage. This expansion addresses increasing interest in full-featured open software-defined storage solutions and marks another milestone in the growth of the Gluster Community from a tightly-controlled open core project to an open source ecosystem with a rapidly growing number of projects and contributors.

The expanding role played by open source communities in the disruption of the storage market is expected to fuel the growth of the new Gluster Community and open software-defined storage. In an IDC Vendor Profile on Red Hat as a Storage solutions provider, IDC stated, “The commoditization of storage and the open source storage stack is in essence a disruptive and unstoppable force that will change the ways of the traditional storage market dominated by vendors selling proprietary hardware and software.”

To facilitate this expansion and provide a home for related projects, the Gluster Community now includes the Gluster Community Forge, a Gitorious-based collaborative development environment where like-minded developers and organizations can incubate, develop and collaborate on new open software defined storage projects. The Gluster Community Forge aims to accelerate the growth of community-driven innovation around GlusterFS and greatly enhance developer and user collaboration.  

“The innovation taking place right now in the software industry is around open source projects and ecosystems,” said Amanda McPhereson, vice president of marketing and developer programs, The Linux Foundation. “The Gluster Community's expansion to support an ecosystem for software-defined

storage is an example of how collaborative development and open source software can be quickly adapted to address industry change.”

Initial new projects span an increasingly wider range of related storage projects across manageability, mobility, security, availability, disaster recovery, interoperability, and storage for big data and cloud computing. Examples of new projects in the Gluster Community Forge include an HDFS Plugin, pmux (file-based mapReduce), gflocator, SAMBA integration, and Dispersed Volume. To include a project for incubation, visit https://forge.gluster.org/projects/new to create a new project.

The Gluster Community has been on the leading edge of development since 2005 when GlusterFS project developers realized that the shift to storage software on commodity hardware would have significant ramifications for the global storage industry.  

John Mark Walker, Gluster Community lead, Red Hat, said, “The Gluster Community Forge and project expansion marks a significant milestone for the Gluster Community. We continue to build momentum globally, growing from a single, open core project to a global open source community with contributions by individual engineers, educational and research communities and organizations. Similar to way the Fedora Community shaped software-defined compute, the goal of the Gluster Community is to transform software-defined storage.”

The Gluster Community uses community-driven innovation to enable organizations to deploy an open software-defined storage fabric and platform that allows for extreme data portability and mobility. GlusterFS is an open source, distributed file system capable of scaling to several petabytes while handling thousands of clients. Based on a stackable user space design, GlusterFS can deliver linear scale-out performance for diverse workloads.

About Red Hat, Inc.

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