Gluster

Gluster, Inc.
Privately funded
Industry Software, computer storage
Founded 2005
Headquarters Sunnyvale, California and Bangalore, India
Number of locations
 2
Key people
 Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy (CTO)
Products Cloud storage
Number of employees
 60
Website www.gluster.com

Gluster Inc. was a software company that provided an open source platform for scale-out public and private cloud storage. The company was privately funded and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California with an engineering center in Bangalore, India. Gluster was funded by Nexus Venture Partners and Index Ventures. Gluster was acquired by Red Hat on October 7, 2011.[1]

History

The name Gluster combined GNU and cluster. Despite the similarity in names, Gluster is not related to the Lustre file system and does not incorporate any Lustre code. Gluster based its product on GlusterFS, an open-source software-based network-attached filesystem that deploys on commodity hardware.[2] The initial version of GlusterFS was written by Anand Babu Periasamy, Gluster’s founder and CTO.[3] In May 2010 Ben Golub became the president and chief executive officer.[4][5]

Red Hat became the primary author and maintainer of the GlusterFS open source project after acquiring the Gluster company in October 2011.[1] The product was first marketed as Red Hat Storage Server, but in early 2015 renamed to be Red Hat Gluster Storage since Red Hat had also acquired the Ceph file system technology as well.[6]

Architecture

The GlusterFS architecture aggregates compute, storage, and I/O resources into a global namespace. Each server plus attached commodity storage (configured as direct-attached storage, JBOD, or using a storage area network) is considered to be a node. Capacity is scaled by adding additional nodes or adding additional storage to each node. Performance is increased by deploying storage among more nodes. High availability is achieved by replicating data n-way between nodes but comes at the expense of reliability.[7]

Public cloud deployment

For public cloud deployments, GlusterFS offers an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which is deployed on Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances rather than physical servers and the underlying storage is Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage (EBS).[8] In this environment, capacity is scaled by deploying more EBS storage units, performance is scaled by deploying more EC2 instances, and availability is scaled by n-way replication between AWS availability zones.

Private cloud deployment

A typical on-premises, or private cloud deployment will consist of GlusterFS installed as a virtual appliance on top of multiple commodity servers running hypervisors such as KVM, Xen, or VMware; or on bare metal.[9]

References

  1. 1 2 "Red Hat to Acquire Gluster". redhat.com. October 4, 2011. Retrieved 2013-08-16.
  2. ↑ "Gluster: Open source scale-out NAS". InfoStor.com. 2011-02-17. Retrieved 2013-08-16.
  3. ↑ Kovar, Joseph F. "Page 17 - 2010 Storage Superstars: 25 You Need To Know". Crn.com. Retrieved 2013-08-16.
  4. ↑ Jason Kincaid (May 18, 2010). "Former Plaxo CEO Ben Golub Joins Gluster, An Open Source Storage Platform Startup". Tech Crunch. Retrieved August 20, 2013.
  5. ↑ "Former Plaxo CEO takes top spot at Gluster". Silicon Valley Business Journal. May 19, 2010. Retrieved August 20, 2013.
  6. ↑ "New product names. Same Great features.". Archived from the original on April 2, 2015. Retrieved October 27, 2016.
  7. ↑ "Split Brain Troubleshooting".
  8. ↑ Nathan Eddy (2011-02-11). "Gluster Introduces NAS Virtual Appliances for VMware, Amazon Web Services". Eweek.com. Retrieved 2013-08-16.
  9. ↑ "Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance". Storage Switzerland, LLC. Retrieved 1 September 2013.
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