Gluster

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.[1]

Gluster, Inc.
Privately funded
IndustrySoftware, computer storage
Founded2005
Headquarters
Sunnyvale, California and Bangalore, India
Number of locations
2
Key people
Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy (CTO) and Hitesh Chellani (CEO)
ProductsCloud storage
Number of employees
60
Websitewww.gluster.com

History

The name Gluster comes from the combination of the terms 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.[2] The initial version of GlusterFS was written by Anand Babu Periasamy, Gluster's founder and CTO.[3] In May 2010 Ben Golub became the president and chief executive officer.[4][5]

Red Hat became the primary author and maintainer of the GlusterFS open-source project after acquiring the Gluster company in October 2011.[1] The product was first marketed as Red Hat Storage Server, but in early 2015 renamed to be Red Hat Gluster Storage since Red Hat has also acquired the Ceph file system technology.[6]

Architecture

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.

Public cloud deployment

For public cloud deployments, GlusterFS offers an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which is deployed on Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances rather than physical servers and the underlying storage is Amazon's Elastic Block Storage (EBS).[7] In this environment, capacity is scaled by deploying more EBS storage units, performance is scaled by deploying more EC2 instances, and availability is scaled by n-way replication between AWS availability zones.

Private cloud deployment

A typical on-premises, or private cloud deployment will consist of GlusterFS installed as a virtual appliance on top of multiple commodity servers running hypervisors such as KVM, Xen, or VMware; or on bare metal.[8]

GlusterFS
GlusterFS
Original author(s)Gluster
Developer(s)Red Hat, Inc.
Stable release
7.5[9] / 16 April 2020 (2020-04-16)
Preview release
v9dev[10] / 17 April 2020 (2020-04-17)
Operating systemLinux, OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris
TypeDistributed file system
LicenseGNU General Public License v3[11]
Websitewww.gluster.org

GlusterFS is a scale-out network-attached storage file system. It has found applications including cloud computing, streaming media services, and content delivery networks. GlusterFS was developed originally by Gluster, Inc. and then by Red Hat, Inc., as a result of Red Hat acquiring Gluster in 2011.[12]

In June 2012, Red Hat Storage Server was announced as a commercially supported integration of GlusterFS with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.[13] Red Hat bought Inktank Storage in April 2014, which is the company behind the Ceph distributed file system, and re-branded GlusterFS-based Red Hat Storage Server to "Red Hat Gluster Storage".[14]

Design

GlusterFS aggregates various storage servers over Ethernet or Infiniband RDMA interconnect into one large parallel network file system. It is free software, with some parts licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v3 while others are dual licensed under either GPL v2 or the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) v3. GlusterFS is based on a stackable user space design.

GlusterFS has a client and server component. Servers are typically deployed as storage bricks, with each server running a glusterfsd daemon to export a local file system as a volume. The glusterfs client process, which connects to servers with a custom protocol over TCP/IP, InfiniBand or Sockets Direct Protocol, creates composite virtual volumes from multiple remote servers using stackable translators. By default, files are stored whole, but striping of files across multiple remote volumes is also possible. The client may mount the composite volume using a GlusterFS native protocol via the FUSE mechanism or using NFS v3 protocol using a built-in server translator, or access the volume via the gfapi client library. The client may re-export a native-protocol mount, for example via the kernel NFSv4 server, SAMBA, or the object-based OpenStack Storage (Swift) protocol using the "UFO" (Unified File and Object) translator.

Most of the functionality of GlusterFS is implemented as translators, including file-based mirroring and replication, file-based striping, file-based load balancing, volume failover, scheduling and disk caching, storage quotas, and volume snapshots with user serviceability (since GlusterFS version 3.6).

The GlusterFS server is intentionally kept simple: it exports an existing directory as-is, leaving it up to client-side translators to structure the store. The clients themselves are stateless, do not communicate with each other, and are expected to have translator configurations consistent with each other. GlusterFS relies on an elastic hashing algorithm, rather than using either a centralized or distributed metadata model. The user can add, delete, or migrate volumes dynamically, which helps to avoid configuration coherency problems. This allows GlusterFS to scale up to several petabytes on commodity hardware by avoiding bottlenecks that normally affect more tightly coupled distributed file systems.

GlusterFS provides data reliability and availability through various kinds of replication: replicated volumes and Geo-replication.[15] Replicated volumes ensure that there exists at least one copy of each file across the bricks, so if one fails, data is still stored and accessible. Geo-replication provides a master-slave model of replication, where volumes are copied across geographically distinct locations. This happens asynchronously and is useful for availability in case of a whole data center failure.

GlusterFS has been used as the foundation for academic research[16][17] and a survey article.[18]

Red Hat markets the software for three markets: "on-premises", public cloud and "private cloud".[19]

gollark: A few weeks ago someone on Hackaday apparently had a VAST quantity of batteryless Windows tablets and I wanted some of them for things, but nooooooo, it costs *money* to ship things.
gollark: It annoys me how there are frequently cool free things in places I'm not.
gollark: Bees.
gollark: Intuition is unfortunately terrible at many of the kinds of decision people like throwing intuition at.
gollark: I make them write code for money to cover the cost of their GPUs.

See also

References
  1. "Red Hat to Acquire Gluster". redhat.com. October 4, 2011. Archived from the original on May 30, 2013. Retrieved 2013-08-16.
  2. "Gluster: Open source scale-out NAS". InfoStor.com. 2011-02-17. Retrieved 2013-08-16.
  3. Kovar, Joseph F. "Page 17 - 2010 Storage Superstars: 25 You Need To Know". Crn.com. Retrieved 2013-08-16.
  4. Jason Kincaid (May 18, 2010). "Former Plaxo CEO Ben Golub Joins Gluster, An Open Source Storage Platform Startup". Tech Crunch. Retrieved August 20, 2013.
  5. "Former Plaxo CEO takes top spot at Gluster". Silicon Valley Business Journal. May 19, 2010. Retrieved August 20, 2013.
  6. "New product names. Same Great features". Archived from the original on April 2, 2015. Retrieved October 27, 2016.
  7. Nathan Eddy (2011-02-11). "Gluster Introduces NAS Virtual Appliances for VMware, Amazon Web Services". Eweek.com. Retrieved 2013-08-16.
  8. "Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance". Storage Switzerland, LLC. Retrieved 1 September 2013.
  9. "glusterfs-6.5 packages tested". Retrieved 16 April 2020.
  10. "[gluster-packaging] glusterfs-7.0rc0 released". Retrieved 17 April 2020.
  11. "Gluster 3.1: Understanding the GlusterFS License". Gluster Documentation. Gluster.org. Retrieved 30 April 2014.
  12. Timothy Prickett Morgan (4 October 2011). "Red Hat snatches storage Gluster file system for $136m". The Register. Retrieved 3 July 2016.
  13. Timothy Prickett Morgan (27 June 2012). "Red Hat Storage Server NAS takes on Lustre, NetApp". The Register. Retrieved 30 May 2013.
  14. "Red Hat Storage. New product names. Same great features". redhat.com. 20 March 2015. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 20 March 2015.
  15. "GlusterFS Documentation". Retrieved January 28, 2018.
  16. Noronha, Ranjit; Panda, Dhabaleswar K (9–12 September 2008). IMCa: A High Performance Caching Front-End for GlusterFS on InfiniBand (PDF). 37th International Conference on Parallel Processing, 2008. ICPP '08. IEEE. doi:10.1109/ICPP.2008.84. Retrieved 14 June 2011.
  17. Kwidama, Sevickson (2007–2008), Streaming and storing CineGrid data: A study on optimization methods (PDF), University of Amsterdam System and Network Engineering, retrieved 10 June 2011
  18. Klaver, Jeroen; van der Jagt, Roel (14 July 2010), Distributed file system on the SURFnet network Report (PDF), University of Amsterdam System and Network Engineering, retrieved 9 June 2012
  19. "Red Hat Storage Server". Web site. Red Hat. Retrieved 30 May 2013.
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