Gluster Inc.(formerly known as Z RESEARCH[1][2][3]) was asoftware companythat provided anopen sourceplatform forscale-outpublic and privatecloud storage.The company was privately funded and headquartered inSunnyvale, California,with an engineering center inBangalore,India. Gluster was funded by Nexus Venture Partners andIndex Ventures.Gluster was acquired byRed Haton October 7, 2011.[4]
 | |
| Company type | Privately funded |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software,computer storage |
| Founded | 2005 |
| Founder | Anand Avati Anand Babu Periasamy  |
| Headquarters | |
Number of locations | 2 |
Key people | Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy (CTO) and Hitesh Chellani (CEO) |
| Products | Cloud storage |
Number of employees | 60 |
| Website | www |
History
editThe nameGlustercomes from the combination of the termsGNUandcluster.[2]Despite the similarity in names, Gluster is not related to theLustrefile system and does not incorporate any Lustre code. Gluster based its product onGlusterFS,an open-source software-basednetwork-attachedfilesystemthat deploys on commodity hardware.[5]The initial version of GlusterFS was written by Anand Babu Periasamy, Gluster's founder and CTO.[6] In May 2010 Ben Golub became the president and chief executive officer.[7][8]
Red Hatbecame the primary author and maintainer of the GlusterFSopen-sourceproject after acquiring the Gluster company in October 2011.[4] The product was first marketed as Red Hat Storage Server, but in early 2015 renamed to be Red Hat Gluster Storage since Red Hat has also acquired theCephfile system technology.[9]
Red Hat Gluster Storage is in the retirement phase of its lifecycle with a end of support life date of December 31, 2024.[10]
Architecture
editThe GlusterFS architecture aggregates compute, storage, and I/O resources into a global namespace. Each server plus attached commodity storage (configured asdirect-attached storage,JBOD,or using astorage area network) 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
editFor public cloud deployments, GlusterFS offers anAmazon Web Services(AWS)Amazon Machine Image(AMI), which is deployed on Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances rather than physical servers and the underlying storage is Amazon'sElastic Block Storage(EBS).[11]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
editA typical on-premises, or private cloud deployment will consist of GlusterFS installed as a virtual appliance on top of multiple commodity servers runninghypervisorssuch asKVM,Xen,orVMware;or on bare metal.[12]
GlusterFS
edit| Original author(s) | Gluster |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Red Hat,Inc. |
| Stable release | 10.1[13]
/ 19 January 2022 |
| Operating system | Linux,OS X,FreeBSD,NetBSD,OpenSolaris |
| Type | Distributed file system |
| License | GNU General Public License v3[14] |
| Website | www |
GlusterFSis ascale-outnetwork-attached storagefile system.It has found applications includingcloud computing,streaming media services, and content delivery networks. GlusterFS was developed originally by Gluster, Inc. and then byRed Hat,Inc., as a result of Red Hat acquiring Gluster in 2011.[15]
In June 2012,Red Hat Storage Serverwas announced as a commercially supported integration of GlusterFS withRed Hat Enterprise Linux.[16]Red Hat boughtInktank Storagein April 2014, which is the company behind theCephdistributed file system, and re-branded GlusterFS-based Red Hat Storage Server to "Red Hat Gluster Storage".[17]
Design
editGlusterFS aggregates various storage servers overEthernetorInfinibandRDMAinterconnect into one large parallel network file system. It is free software, with some parts licensed under the GNUGeneral Public License(GPL) v3 while others are dual licensed under either GPL v2 or theLesser General Public License(LGPL) v3. GlusterFS is based on a stackable user space design.
GlusterFS has a client and server component. Servers are typically deployed asstorage bricks,with each server running aglusterfsddaemon to export a local file system as avolume.Theglusterfsclient process, which connects to servers with a custom protocol overTCP/IP,InfiniBand orSockets Direct Protocol,creates composite virtual volumes from multiple remote servers using stackabletranslators.By default, files are stored whole, butstripingof files across multiple remote volumes is also possible. The client maymountthe composite volume using a GlusterFS native protocol via theFUSEmechanism or usingNFSv3protocol using a built-in server translator, or access the volume via thegfapiclient library. The client may re-export a native-protocol mount, for example via the kernelNFSv4server,SAMBA,or the object-basedOpenStackStorage (Swift) protocol using the "UFO" (Unified File and Object) translator.
Most of the functionality of GlusterFS is implemented as translators, including file-basedmirroringandreplication,file-basedstriping,file-basedload balancing,volumefailover,schedulinganddisk caching,storage quotas,and volumesnapshotswith user serviceability (since GlusterFS version 3.6).
The GlusterFS server is intentionally kept simple: it exports an existingdirectoryas-is, leaving it up to client-side translators to structure the store. The clients themselves are stateless, do not communicate with each other, and are expected to have translator configurations consistent with each other. GlusterFS relies on an elastichashingalgorithm, rather than using either a centralized or distributed metadata model. The user can add, delete, or migrate volumes dynamically, which helps to avoid configurationcoherencyproblems. This allows GlusterFS to scale up to severalpetabytesoncommodity hardwareby avoiding bottlenecks that normally affect more tightly coupled distributed file systems.
GlusterFS provides data reliability and availability through various kinds of replication: replicated volumes andgeo-replication.[18]Replicated volumes ensure that there exists at least one copy of each file across the bricks, so if one fails, data is still stored and accessible. Geo-replication provides a master-slave model of replication, where volumes are copied across geographically distinct locations. This happens asynchronously and is useful for availability in case of a whole data center failure.
GlusterFS has been used as the foundation for academic research[19][20] and a survey article.[21]
Red Hat markets the software for three markets: "on-premises",public cloudand "private cloud".[22]
See also
edit
References
edit- ^"About Us".gluster.com.2008. Archived fromthe originalon 2010-09-09.Retrieved2022-07-31.
- ^abRaj, Chandan (2011-09-20)."California based Indian Entrepreneurs powering petabytes of cloud storage, the Gluster story".YourStory.Bengaluru, India:Scribd.Retrieved2022-07-31.
- ^Chellani, Hitesh (2007-05-12)."Roadmap and support questions".gluster-devel(Mailing list).Retrieved31 July2022.
Z Research was officially formed in June 2005 by AB (Anand Babu) aka "rooty" who is the CTO and myself with the goal of commoditizing Supercomputing and Superstorage and in the process validating yet another a business model around "Free Software", thus evangelizing "Free Software" and promoting the fact building businesses around "Free Software" is the way forward.
- ^ab"Red Hat to Acquire Gluster".redhat.com. October 4, 2011. Archived fromthe originalon May 30, 2013.Retrieved2013-08-16.
- ^"Gluster: Open source scale-out NAS".InfoStor.com. 2011-02-17.Retrieved2013-08-16.
- ^Kovar, Joseph F. (21 June 2010)."Page 17 - 2010 Storage Superstars: 25 You Need To Know".Crn.com.Retrieved2013-08-16.
- ^Jason Kincaid (May 18, 2010)."Former Plaxo CEO Ben Golub Joins Gluster, An Open Source Storage Platform Startup".Tech Crunch.RetrievedAugust 20,2013.
- ^"Former Plaxo CEO takes top spot at Gluster".Silicon Valley Business Journal.May 19, 2010.RetrievedAugust 20,2013.
- ^"New product names. Same Great features".Archived fromthe originalon April 2, 2015.RetrievedOctober 27,2016.
- ^Red Hat access website (2022-10-10)."Red Hat Gluster Storage Life Cycle".
- ^Nathan Eddy (2011-02-11)."Gluster Introduces NAS Virtual Appliances for VMware, Amazon Web Services".Eweek.com.Retrieved2013-08-16.
- ^"Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance".Storage Switzerland, LLC.Retrieved1 September2013.
- ^"glusterfs-10.1 released".19 January 2022.Retrieved11 September2022.
- ^"Gluster 3.1: Understanding the GlusterFS License".Gluster Documentation.Gluster.org. Archived fromthe originalon 3 May 2016.Retrieved30 April2014.
- ^Timothy Prickett Morgan (4 October 2011)."Red Hat snatches storage Gluster file system for $136m".The Register.Retrieved3 July2016.
- ^Timothy Prickett Morgan (27 June 2012)."Red Hat Storage Server NAS takes on Lustre, NetApp".The Register.Retrieved30 May2013.
- ^"Red Hat Storage. New product names. Same great features".redhat.com.20 March 2015. Archived fromthe originalon 2 April 2015.Retrieved20 March2015.
- ^"GlusterFS Documentation".RetrievedJanuary 28,2018.
- ^Noronha, Ranjit; Panda, Dhabaleswar K (9–12 September 2008).IMCa: A High Performance Caching Front-End for GlusterFS on InfiniBand(PDF).37th International Conference on Parallel Processing, 2008. ICPP '08.IEEE.doi:10.1109/ICPP.2008.84.Retrieved14 June2011.
- ^Kwidama, Sevickson (2007–2008),Streaming and storing CineGrid data: A study on optimization methods(PDF),University of Amsterdam System and Network Engineering, archived fromthe original(PDF)on 2014-03-08,retrieved10 June2011
- ^Klaver, Jeroen; van der Jagt, Roel (14 July 2010),Distributed file system on the SURFnet network Report(PDF),University of Amsterdam System and Network Engineering,retrieved9 June2012[dead link]
- ^"Red Hat Storage Server".Web site.Red Hat.Retrieved30 May2013.