Acquia Selects Gluster on Drupal

Gluster, provider of open source storage solutions, announced that Acquia, a commercial open source software company that provides products, services and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system, has deployed Gluster’s open source storage solutions for their Drupal website hosting offering running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

With over two million downloads, Drupal is used by web developers worldwide to build community-driven websites. As a strategic member of the global Drupal community, Acquia helps accelerate Drupal usage by simplifying the deployment and management of Drupal websites. One of the key elements for Drupal is a scalable file system for users to upload and manage files, pictures, music, content, etc. Because of their growth and increasing storage needs, Acquia needed a file system that was easy to use and featured scalable performance and high availability, while being able to easily integrate within the Amazon environment – all of which Gluster provides.

"It was very difficult to find a network file system that would run in EC2 and allow us to share file data across all of our web servers," said Barry Jaspan, senior architect at Acquia. "Gluster can do this, and provides the high availability and seamless integration with AWS we need across multiple web servers. The fact that it is an open source solution is also a major benefit for us, as it goes hand in hand with our mission of furthering open source and supporting open source companies."

With Gluster, Acquia is now able to ensure files are available to users across all web servers with read/write access at any time, and with the use of file replication ensures data availability even in the event of hardware failure. Additionally, Gluster meets the Drupal requirement for a POSIX-compliant file system. Gluster uses the same operations as UNIX for multitenancy and file locking, and allows Acquia to dramatically save on storage costs due to its ability to run on public cloud infrastructure.

"Acquia is at the forefront of cloud adoption, demonstrating that innovative IT strategies can create new business models enabled by public cloud infrastructure and open source software," said Ben Golub, CEO of Gluster. "Gluster helps them do this by providing an easy-to-use storage solution that ensures scalable data access at any time of day, allowing them to provide their users with great quality of service."

To read the Acquia case study