Gluster Adds KVM, Xen Support to Virtual Storage Appliance

If it’s not storage making waves in the channel, it’s virtual storage, and Gluster is the latest vendor to show its love for the space. The company announced its Virtual Storage Appliances now support KVM and Xen. Read on for a little about how the cloud-focused company is dipping its toes into the virtualization pool …

We’ve taken a look at Gluster in the past, when it joined up with the OpenStack community. Now, Gluster has its sights set on virtualization, with support for KVM and Xen on its Virtual Storage Appliances. Supporting these Linux-based standards puts Gluster in the position to offer an appliance that gives the enterprise the ability to treat physical storage as a virtualized scale-on-demand pool. According to Gluster, this allows enterprises to save a few bucks in the storage department. It also allows Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances to have multi-hypervisor support for integrated GlusterFS on any hypervisor or cloud platform.

Gluster went with KVM and Xen because of their “popularity and rapid growth” in addition to market demand for the scale-out cloud storage features that GlusterFS can provide. The Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance is software-only, which allows it to be free from hardware restraints, enabling virtualized storage, memory and other resources in a “unified global namespace.” Gluster explained this is how its technology can scale out, essentially, without limits.

Partners can get their hands on the upgraded appliance now, making Gluster a KVM-, Xen- and VMware-friendly storage solution for cloud proliferation.

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