GlusterFS 3.2

Gluster announced the availability of GlusterFS 3.2.

This latest release includes Continuous Data Replication, which enables multi-site data protection for public and private clouds.

In addition, the update includes enhanced multi-tenant management for public and private clouds, with usage quotas and new monitoring tools for improved visibility into I/O operations profiles and performance statistics.

Version 3.2 of Gluster is available for the full line of Gluster solutions, including those for public clouds (the Gluster AMI and Rightscale Template) and private clouds (the Virtual Storage Appliances for VMware, KVM, and Xen, and the recently announced Gluster Software Appliance). The open source version of GlusterFS 3.2 was also released to the community.

Gluster’s software-only storage solutions give enterprises the ability to treat physical storage as a virtualized, standardized and scale-on-demand pool in much the same way they treat computing resources today, radically improving storage economics in the process. Gluster frees enterprises from the constraints of proprietary, monolithic storage architectures by enabling them to create scalable, performance, and available storage either in the public cloud or on their choice of commodity hardware within the data center. Gluster delivers functional, POSIX-compliant storage solutions that pool storage resources under a global namespace, delivering availability, linearly scalable performance and capacity, as well as elastic volume management, which enables data growth and migration to be managed with no downtime.

"As an increasing number of companies are moving into the implementation phase of cloud computing, they are quickly realizing the crucial role storage plays in ensuring the deployment is successful," said George Crump, president and founder of Storage-Switzerland. "The latest product release by Gluster includes a number of key features for more effective business use of cloud storage, including continuous data replication, making the decision easier for enterprises to employ cloud computing in their overall IT strategy and within their enterprise data centers."

Features of the new 3.2 release include:

• Geo-Replication – providing continuous, asynchronous and incremental replication service from one site to another over local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), and across the Internet. Only incremental changes are replicated, eliminating the need for snapshot-like copies of whole files or volumes. In addition, 3.2 features intelligent asynchronous replication in which GlusterFS tracks changes to the primary data and replicates in real time across a WAN. Changes are tracked and queued to ensure data stays synchronized regardless of latency or potential network interruptions.
• Aaccessible usage quotas – with the ability to set quota on usage of disk space by directories or volumes. Storage administrators can control disk space utilization at the directory and/or volume levels with Gluster by setting limits to allocate disk space at any level in the volume and directory hierarchy. This is particularly useful in cloud deployments to facilitate the utility billing model.
• New monitoring and management tools (Gluster Top and Profile) – that provide familiar monitoring and statistics capabilities for I/O operations and performance statistics. Gluster Top presents the top 100 operations per server, providing visibility into the I/O workload pattern. Gluster Profile provides performance statistics over a user-defined time period for metrics including latency, number and type of calls, and amount of data read or written.

"Gluster has long believed that that storage must change radically to match both the architectures and economics of the cloud," said Ben Golub, president and CEO at Gluster. "With this release, we not only provide the fastest path to public and private cloud storage, we also provide a powerful set of tools for connecting public and private clouds."

In both public and private clouds, Gluster enables enterprises to scale on demand to petabytes of capacity and GB/s of throughput on commodity physical and cloud hardware, yielding unrivalled economics in the process. Now, Gluster also enables enterprises to scale out availability on-demand, enabling both Synchronous N-way replication within the data center and across high-speed links, and Asynchronous Geo-Replication between data centers across WANs. For public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), GlusterFS is packaged in an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for deployment in the AWS cloud. The Gluster AMI is the way to deploy high-availability storage within AWS and deliver predictable high performance during rapidly changing and demanding workloads. For private clouds, the Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances integrate GlusterFS into a virtual machine for deployment on popular hypervisor environments such as Red Hat KVM, VMware ESX and Citrix Xen and run on the enterprise’s choice of certified hardware platforms.

The newly announced Gluster Storage Software Appliances for private cloud and on-premise data centers combine a prepackaged operating system with GlusterFS and can be deployed on any Red Hat Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) certified host server and its certified storage, bringing unrivaled high availability, performance, scalability and the cost savings benefits of commodity to the private cloud and data center.

"Since we announced our Storage Appliances in February, we have received extremely positive feedback from our customers and the community," said AB Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster. "We continually strive to enhance our solution and make it as comprehensive as possible for public and private cloud, such as adding these new data replication and management capabilities."

Version 3.2 of GlusterFS for all of its Storage Appliances, including the Open Source edition, is available.