Gluster

Gluster, Inc.

Type	Privately funded
Industry	Software, computer storage
Founded	2005
Headquarters	Sunnyvale, California and Bangalore, India
Number of locations	2
Key people	Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy (CTO)
Products	Cloud storage
Number of employees	60
Website	www.gluster.com

Gluster Inc. was a software company that provided an open source platform for scale-out public and private cloud storage. The company was privately funded and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California with an engineering center in Bangalore, India. Gluster was funded by Nexus Venture Partners and Index Ventures. Gluster was acquired by Red Hat on October 7, 2011.

The name Gluster combined GNU and cluster. Despite the similarity in names, Gluster is not related to the Lustre file system and does not incorporate any Lustre code. Gluster based its product on GlusterFS, an open-source software-based network-attached filesystem that deploys on commodity hardware. The initial version of GlusterFS was written by Anand Babu Periasamy, Gluster’s founder and CTO. In May 2010 Ben Golub became the president and chief executive officer.

Red Hat became the primary author and maintainer of the GlusterFS open source project after acquiring the Gluster company in October 2011. The product was first marketed as Red Hat Storage Server, but in early 2015 renamed to be Red Hat Gluster Storage since Red Hat had also acquired the Ceph file system technology as well.

The GlusterFS architecture aggregates compute, storage, and I/O resources into a global namespace. Each server plus attached commodity storage (configured as direct-attached storage, JBOD, or using a storage 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 but comes at the expense of reliability.