Beta Availability of GlusterFS 3.3

Gluster, Inc. announced the beta release of GlusterFS 3.3.

This version of Gluster’s file system provides a system for data storage
that enables users to access the same data as an object and as a file,
simplifying management and controlling storage costs. Available for
virtual machines, and in public and private cloud environments,
Gluster’s software-only storage technology delivers at true unified file
and object data storage. Users can now have simultaneous access to data
as a file and as an object, delivering the benefits of both.
 
"Enterprises are increasingly looking for a storage solution that can
accelerate their adoption of the cloud and many have been hesitant
because of the lack of storage technologies enabling them to do this,"
said Deni Connor, founder, Storage Strategies NOW. "Gluster is
continuing to innovate and raise the competitive bar as they release new
capabilities within their file system. GlusterFS 3.3, with unified file
and object storage technology, is key to enterprise customer’s ability
to adopt and deploy cloud storage solutions."
 
GlusterFS 3.3 allows users to access data as objects from an Amazon S3
compatible interface and access files from a NAS interface including NFS
and CIFS. In addition to decreasing cost and making it faster and
easier to access object data, GlusterFS also delivers scalability,
availability and replication of object storage. For infrastructure as a
service offerings, GlusterFS 3.3 enables organizations to build their
own Amazon-like storage offering for their customers. Enterprises can
use GlusterFS to accelerate the process of preparing applications for
the cloud, simplify new application development for cloud computing
environments, and backup from data center unified file and object to
Amazon Web Services (AWS) or within the private cloud.
 
"Traditional object storage technologies have not been widely deployed
because their approach has not integrated well with legacy applications –
leaving 95 percent of those applications unable to easily migrate to
the cloud. Additionally, NAS has been unable to scale across the
Internet to the public cloud. GlusterFS 3.3 takes a unified approach via
full integration of file and object storage within the file system,"
said AB Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster. "We are the first to
solve both the NAS scaling and legacy application integration with
object storage problems. We listen carefully to our customers and
community and we are excited to deliver this next step of unified
storage technology for virtual and cloud environments."

Infrastructure service providers can use GlusterFS 3.3 to offer access
to both file and object storage, and enterprises will be able to use
this release to ease the migration of legacy, file-based applications to
object storage for use in the cloud. In both public and private clouds,
Gluster enables enterprises to scale on demand to petabytes of capacity
and GB/s of throughput on commodity physical and cloud hardware,
yielding unrivalled economics in the process. Gluster also enables
enterprises to scale out availability on-demand, enabling both
Synchronous N-way replication within the data center and across
high-speed links, and Asynchronous Geo-Replication between data centers
across WANs. For public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS),
GlusterFS is packaged in an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for deployment in
the AWS cloud. The Gluster AMI is the only way to deploy
high-availability storage within AWS and deliver predictable high
performance during changing and demanding workloads. For private clouds,
the Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances integrate GlusterFS into a
virtual machine for deployment on hypervisor environments such as Red
Hat KVM, VMware ESX and Citrix Xen and run on the enterprise’s choice of
certified hardware platforms.
 
Product Availability
Version 3.3 of GlusterFS is currently in beta and is available since
July 20, 2011.

To participate in the public beta
download