Gluster Community Brings Out Multi-Project for Software-Defined Storage

Red
Hat, Inc. announced that the Gluster
Community, a Red Hat-sponsored community, has extended its
charter from a single project to a multi-project open source
community for open software-defined storage.

This expansion addresses interest in
open software-defined storage solutions and marks another milestone
in the growth of the community from a controlled open core project to
an open source ecosystem with a growing number of projects and
contributors.

The role played by open source
communities in the disruption of the storage market is expected to
fuel the growth of the community and open software-defined storage.

In an vendor profile on Red Hat as
a storage solutions provider, IDC stated: "The
commoditization of storage and the open source storage stack is in
essence a disruptive and unstoppable force that will change the ways
of the traditional storage market dominated by vendors selling
proprietary hardware and software."

To facilitate this expansion and
provide a home for related projects, the community includes the
Gluster Community Forge, a Gitorious-based collaborative development
environment where like-minded developers and organizations can
incubate, develop and collaborate on open software defined storage
projects. Its aims is to accelerate the growth of community-driven
innovation around GlusterFS and enhance developer and user
collaboration.

"The innovation taking place
right now in the software industry is around open source projects and
ecosystems," said Amanda McPhereson, VP marketing and
developer programs, The Linux Foundation. "The Gluster
Community’s expansion to support an ecosystem for software-defined storage is an example of how
collaborative development and open source software can be quickly
adapted to address industry change."

Initial projects span a wider range of
related storage projects across manageability, mobility, security,
availability, DR, interoperability, and storage for big data and
cloud computing. Examples of projects in the Gluster Community Forge
include an HDFS plug-in, pmux (file-based mapReduce), gflocator,
SAMBA integration, and Dispersed Volume. To include a project for
incubation, visit the
forge to create a project.

The community has been on the leading
edge of development since 2005 when GlusterFS project developers
realized that the shift to storage software on commodity hardware
would have ramifications for the global storage industry.

John Mark Walker, Gluster Community
lead, Red Hat, said: "The Gluster Community Forge and project
expansion marks a significant milestone for the Gluster Community. We
continue to build momentum globally, growing from a single, open core
project to a global open source community with contributions by
individual engineers, educational and research communities and
organizations. Similar to way the Fedora Community shaped
software-defined compute, the goal of the Gluster Community is to
transform software-defined storage."

The Gluster Community uses
community-driven innovation to enable organizations to deploy an open
software-defined storage fabric and platform that allows for data
portability and mobility. GlusterFS is an open source, distributed
file system capable of scaling to several PBs while handling
thousands of clients. Based on a stackable user space design,
GlusterFS can deliver linear scale-out performance for diverse
workloads.