Q&A: Gluster provides a platform for open source storage virtualization

Gluster upgrades open source clustered storage with virtual machine support and data storage management

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Storage startup Gluster has become the latest vendor to join a recent wave of emerging companies providing enterprise storage management features to industry standard hardware and commodity-based clustered NAS systems. The company's platform is said to answer the question of scale by supporting hundreds of petabytes in a single volume.

Gluster came out of stealth mode back in 2007 when it announced GlusterFS, a general-purpose distributed file system for clustered NAS based on open source code. The technology was improved upon last May when the company announced the release of version 2 of GlusterFS. It added intelligent data placement to help optimize resources and reduce bottlenecks, introduced efficiencies into the file system for handling small files, and added optimizations for cloud storage.

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And now the latest announcement coming from the company is around the Gluster Storage Platform, which builds on the existing management features already offered with a new Web-based management interface, a new software delivery model, and support for high availability with replicated data and self-healing with error detection and correction within files.

The company has also introduced support for virtual machines, which is what really grabbed my attention. The company mentioned that replicated virtual machines could continuously operate in the event of a hardware failure, recovery being performed in the background without requiring a restart of blocking I/O to the live VM. To find out more, I spoke with Jack O'Brien, senior director of marketing at Gluster.

InfoWorld: Tell readers a little bit about Gluster and the problems that the company is focused on.

Gluster: Gluster provides an open source clustered storage platform that installs on industry standard hardware. We are focused on simplifying the task of storing massive amounts of unstructured file data, and we do this with a solution that scales horizontally to deliver required capacity and performance with a unified global namespace.