Red Hat announced it's paying $136 million to acquire Gluster,
a startup founded in 2005 with the goal of simplifying storage using
open source software and commodity hardware. The company appropriately
gets its name from a combination of the words "GNU" and "cluster."
This
acquisition marks an exciting new area of potential growth for Red Hat
as industry analysts estimate the total addressable market for
unstructured data storage at approximately $4 billion and growing.
At the heart of the startup company is its technology called
GlusterFS, a software-only, scale-out storage system that allows
enterprises to combine large numbers of commodity storage and compute
resources into a high-performance, centrally managed, and globally
accessible storage pool. It is capable of scaling to several petabytes
of data, and clusters storage building blocks over Infiniband RDMA
(Remote Direct Memory Access) or a TCP/IP interconnect. GlusterFS was
built upon an open source model that makes for a good fit with Red Hat's
operation.
Currently, GlusterFS supports Apache Hadoop for Big
Data applications and can be installed across a host of file systems
such as ext3, ext4, XFS -- exposing the file system as a global
namespace that spans the storage server nodes as a CIFS, NFS, or Gluster
Native mount point. It also sends data to Linux, Unix, and Windows
servers, and it has multitenant capabilities that give it added value
for use in a private or public cloud.
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