Red Hat Announces GlusterFS 3.4 Software-Defined Storage

GlusterFS, Red Hat‘s (RHT) open source software-defined storage solution for Big Data and the cloud, continues to gain momentum. This week, Red Hat announced that the Gluster Community, a consortium of organizations interested in the storage technology, has nearly tripled in size since its launch back in June. Plus, the company unveiled a version 3.4 of GlusterFS.

Red Hat measured the growth in terms of the total number of developers involved in the Gluster Community. The expansion also included an increase from seven projects involved in the group at the time of its launch to more than 30 currently.

Red Hat attributed the growth in part to the introduction of Gluster Community Forge, a repository for developing GlusterFS-related software à la GitHub and SourceForge. That GlusterFS’s supporters created a code hub just for the storage platform is a sign of just how big an ecosystem they envision building around it.

The announcement of rapid growth in the Gluster Community coincided with the release of version 3.4 of GlusterFS. The software now features integration with the QEMU/KVM open source virtualization hypervisor, performance enhancements and updates targeted at the cloud, according to Red Hat.

Last but not least, Red Hat is now proclaiming GlusterFS “OpenStack-ready.” That update, the company says, means the storage platform supports all three OpenStack storage modes, and can be administered via OpenStack’s Swift, Cinder, and Glance storage interfaces.

Ceph, a competing open source storage platform that enjoys the support of much of the other half of the open source world—especially from Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux—also continues to grow. Whether GlusterFS will coexist with it, or one eventually prevail over the other, remains to be seen. For now, what is certain is that open source software-defined storage is undergoing rapid evolution, and is in turn driving continued innovation in the cloud and Big Data.