Network Attached Storage

In the open source community, GlusterFS has earned itself a Red Hat (News - Alert) sponsorship to further its efforts in networked attached storage (NAS). Based on a stackable user space design, it has found a variety of applications including cloud computing, streaming media services, and content delivery networks.

Earlier this year, the company announced the next generation of its GlusterFS, coming to the public as version 3.3, the first launch since its purchase from Red Hat and goes beyond NAS.

Originally planned for launch by the end of 2011, Gluster 3.3 was an unusually long release, for several reasons, including the fact that the scope of the release was fairly large.

The new release provides an integration point for Apache Hadoop enabling Hadoop users to use Gluster for storage. According to Gluster, their filesystem is also comptable with Hadoop's own HDFS (Hadoop File System), though Gluster provides some additional benefits including scalability and performance improvements.

"Between HDFS compatibility, Unified File and Object storage, self-healing improvements, granular healing, quorum enforcement and other improvements, a lot went into this release," Walker said, according to InfoStor. "We also retooled our community for open governance and transparency and were able to put more resources into QA and release management."

New features include:

• Unified File and Object storage – Blending OpenStack’s Object Storage API with GlusterFS provides simultaneous read and write access to data as files or as objects.
• HDFS compatibility – Gives Hadoop administrators the ability to run MapReduce jobs on unstructured data on GlusterFS and access the data with well-known tools and shell scripts.
• Proactive self-healing – GlusterFS volumes will now automatically restore file integrity after a replica recovers from failure.

Packages are available for most distributions, including Fedora, Debian, RHEL, Ubuntu (News - Alert) and CentOS via gluster.org.

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