Gluster
Encyclopedia
Gluster Inc. is a software company that provides an open source platform for scale-out Public and Private Cloud Storage. The company is privately funded and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California
with an engineering center in Bangalore
, India. Gluster is funded by Nexus Venture Partners and Index Ventures
. On October 4, 2011, Red Hat
announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Gluster.
, an open source software network attached (NAS) filesystem that deploys on commodity hardware. The initial version of GlusterFS
was written by Anand Babu Periasamy, Gluster’s founder and current CTO. The Gluster commercial organization continues to be the primary author and maintainer of the GlusterFS
Open Source
Project, and also maintains the open source website at www.gluster.org. The Gluster Open Source Community consists of over 8000-user developers.
) 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.
(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). 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.
, KVM
, or Xen
. 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.
and cluster. Despite the similarity in names, Gluster is not related to the Oracle
Lustre
file system and does not incorporate any Lustre code.
Sunnyvale, California
Sunnyvale is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. It is one of the major cities that make up the Silicon Valley located in the San Francisco Bay Area...
with an engineering center in Bangalore
Bangalore
Bengaluru , formerly called Bengaluru is the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka. Bangalore is nicknamed the Garden City and was once called a pensioner's paradise. Located on the Deccan Plateau in the south-eastern part of Karnataka, Bangalore is India's third most populous city and...
, India. Gluster is funded by Nexus Venture Partners and Index Ventures
Index Ventures
Index Ventures is a venture capital investment firm based in Geneva, Switzerland, with offices in London, Jersey, and starting in 2011, Silcon Valley. The firm was founded in 1996 by Neil Rimer and Giuseppe Zocco. Since its inception, the firm has raised four main venture funds and a growth...
. On October 4, 2011, Red Hat
Red Hat
Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....
announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Gluster.
Relationship to GlusterFS
Gluster’s products are based on GlusterFSGlusterFS
GlusterFS is a scale-out NAS file system developed by Gluster. It aggregates various storage servers over Ethernet or Infiniband RDMA interconnect into one large parallel network file system. GlusterFS is based on a stackable user space design without compromising performance. It has found a...
, an open source software network attached (NAS) filesystem that deploys on commodity hardware. The initial version of GlusterFS
GlusterFS
GlusterFS is a scale-out NAS file system developed by Gluster. It aggregates various storage servers over Ethernet or Infiniband RDMA interconnect into one large parallel network file system. GlusterFS is based on a stackable user space design without compromising performance. It has found a...
was written by Anand Babu Periasamy, Gluster’s founder and current CTO. The Gluster commercial organization continues to be the primary author and maintainer of the GlusterFS
GlusterFS
GlusterFS is a scale-out NAS file system developed by Gluster. It aggregates various storage servers over Ethernet or Infiniband RDMA interconnect into one large parallel network file system. GlusterFS is based on a stackable user space design without compromising performance. It has found a...
Open Source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
Project, and also maintains the open source website at www.gluster.org. The Gluster Open Source Community consists of over 8000-user developers.
Architecture
The Gluster architecture aggregates compute, storage, and I/O resources into a global namespace. Each server plus attached commodity storage (configured as DAS, JBOD, or SANStorage area network
A storage area network is a dedicated network that provides access to consolidated, block level data storage. SANs are primarily used to make storage devices, such as disk arrays, tape libraries, and optical jukeboxes, accessible to servers so that the devices appear like locally attached devices...
) 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.
Public Cloud Deployment
For public cloud deployments, Gluster offers an Amazon Web ServicesAmazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services is a collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com...
(AWS) Amazon Machine Image
Amazon Machine Image
An Amazon Machine Image is a special type of virtual appliance which is used to instantiate a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud...
(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). 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-premise, or private cloud Gluster deployment will consist of Gluster deployed as a virtual appliance on top of multiple commodity servers running hypervisors such as VMwareVMware
VMware, Inc. is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary ....
, KVM
Kernel-based Virtual Machine
Kernel-based Virtual Machine is a virtualization infrastructure for the Linux kernel. KVM supports native virtualization on processors with hardware virtualization extensions....
, or Xen
Xen
Xen is a virtual-machine monitor providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently....
. 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.
Company Name
The name Gluster is a portmanteau of GNUGNU
GNU is a Unix-like computer operating system developed by the GNU project, ultimately aiming to be a "complete Unix-compatible software system"...
and cluster. Despite the similarity in names, Gluster is not related to the Oracle
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
Lustre
Lustre (file system)
Lustre is a massively parallel distributed file system, generally used for large scale cluster computing. The name Lustre is a portmanteau word derived from Linux and cluster...
file system and does not incorporate any Lustre code.