Gluster, the leading provider of open source storage solutions, today announced the general availability of Gluster Storage Platform 3.1, with new capabilities to enable improved elastic volume management and automation. The new release is suited for the needs of dynamic cloud and data environments, allowing data to elastically grow, shrink or migrate across the physical machines in a cluster without any downtime or service interruptions. Storage volume configuration changes can be made on-the-fly for real time response to changing workload or performance tuning. Gluster Storage Platform 3.1 is available under the GNU Affero General Public License.

“What Gluster Storage Platform does incredibly well is provide an easy to use, cost effective and efficient storage platform that addresses the needs of data centers today and is also architected to grow with them as their networks and needs evolve,” said Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster. “The new capabilities in Gluster Storage Platform allow us to better address the dynamic storage requirements of modern cloud and data center environments.”

Gluster Storage Platform 3.1 benefits include:

• Elastic Volume Management: logical storage volumes are decoupled from physical hardware, allowing administrators to grow, shrink and migrate storage volumes without any application downtime. As storage is added, storage volumes are automatically rebalanced across the cluster making it always available online regardless of changes to the underlying hardware.
• New Gluster Console Manager: the Command Line Interface (CLI), Application Programming Interface (API) and shell are merged into a single powerful interface, enabling automation by giving the CLI higher level API’s and scripting capabilities. Languages such as Python, Ruby or PHP can be used to script a series of commands that are invoked through the command line. This new tool requires no new APIs and is able to script out and rapidly automate any information inserted in the CLI allowing cloud administrators the ability to simply automate large scale operations.
• Native Network File System (NFS): including a native NFS v3 module which allows storage servers to communicate natively with NFS clients directly to any storage server in the cluster and simultaneously communicates NFS and the Gluster protocol. NFS requires no specialized training, making it simple and easy to deploy.

Gluster 3.1 continues to offer high availability with file replication – allowing servers to survive hardware failures and self-healing to ensure virtual machines (VMs) are always on. With Gluster Storage Platform, data access is scaled horizontally across multiple storage nodes with automatic I/O scheduling and load balancing. Gluster combines open source software with commodity hardware for compelling cost savings.