Jack O'Brien, Gluster's
VP of Marketing, stopped by to both introduce me to his company's open
source storage virtualization software and an upcoming announcement that
Gluster will be supplying RightScale
with storage virtualization products for the Rightscale cloud
management platform. (for more information on Rightscale, please see RightScale: Windows now 'usable' in cloud.)
Here's what Gluster has to say about its software
Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance for RightScale packages GlusterFS scale-out NAS in a ServerTemplate enabling high availability, shared storage in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environments with Elastic Block Storage (EBS). RightScale customers can scale-out storage on demand and pay as they grow.
Gluster is storage for the modern data center, providing scale-out NAS within the RightScale Cloud Management Platform. Hundreds of enterprises worldwide use our software-only platform to aggregate storage resources (either on-premise or in the cloud) into a unified high performance, standardized, virtualized, and centrally managed pool. The Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance for RightScale is deployed in minutes in Amazon EC2 instances. Within the Amazon Web Services environment data is stored on Elastic Block Storage (EBS). Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances pool multiple EBS storage elements together eliminating capacity limitations of a single device and smoothing out small performance variations across the pool. The Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance is a highly available virtual storage solution for Amazon EC2 instances. Users with high availability requirements can rely upon the Gluster file replication capability to provide N-way replication to assure data availability. Additionally, the Gluster ServerTemplate works across Amazon Web Services Availability Zones.
Snapshot analysis
Virtual processing solutions, to be most effective, should be paired with virtual storage and, possibly, virtual access solutions. It is clear that the folks at RightScale and other suppliers of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) offerings agree with this assessment.
It
appears that Gluster's software addresses many of the needs
organizations have for building highly available storage environments to
complement their high availabilty processing solutions.