

Red Hat buys Gluster - jwildeboer
http://www.redhat.com/promo/storage/
Storage solutions absed on Open find their real home, as it seems. Congrats!
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chops
This is pretty awesome news. I've been running GlusterFS on my guild hosting
system for coming on 4 years or so. While I haven't followed the project
terribly closely, hearing RedHat has acquired it is good news for the
longevity of the project. I never quite knew how well known or high profile it
was, and always wondered if it would be abandoned.

This makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. _thumbs up_

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plinkplonk
Personally I am happy to see a company make solid money creating good
technical products. Especially open source code. 136 million $ _in cash_ for
an Open Source company is pretty sweet. Gluster has some awesome people and
they deserve their success.

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lsc
Yeah, and if anyone is going to buy it and not ruin the open-source product,
it's redhat. I mean, I'm not happy with their recent decision to release the
kernel as one giant blob of code rather than the upstream plus patches, but
RedHat is still worlds better (as a steward of an open-source product) than
any other corporation with the resources to drop that kind of scratch.

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wmf
Besides the other reasons given, Red Hat's HekaFS cloud filesystem is based on
GlusterFS.

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joshhart
$136M is a lot of money for a distributed file system. Can anyone compare
GlusterFS to HDFS? I think they're booth GoogleFS clones but I'm not sure on
the details except that HDFS uses a name node and is written in Java.

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antoncohen
> Can anyone compare GlusterFS to HDFS? I think they're booth GoogleFS clones
> but I'm not sure on the details except that HDFS uses a name node and is
> written in Java.

I don't think GlusterFS is GoogleFS clone. As far as I know HDFS isn't meant
to be a mountable file system. GlusterFS is a near POSIX-compliant FS that can
be mounted with FUSE. The FUSE mounts are then exported via NFS or CIFS. At
least that is how it was 2 years ago when I tried it. I think NFS is now a
native export option of GlusterFS volumes via the NFS Translator. In my mind
GlusterFS is more like Isilon than HDFS.

I don't really like the fact that GlusterFS is in user-space. I think Ceph is
a more promising project: <http://ceph.newdream.net/>

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krishnasrinivas
Having GlusterFS in user space gave us a lot of advantages (development cycle
time, bugs not panicking the kernel etc) ... besides in a distributed scale
out architecture doing things in kernel or user space does not make much of a
difference for performance as either network or the disks become the
bottleneck.

As you mentioned the storage volume can be mounted via NFS too.

