New Charter Members for Gluster Community

Red Hat, Inc. announced that seven charter member organizations have signed letters of intent to join the Gluster Community, the open source community for open software-defined storage.

This marks the second major expansion of the Gluster Community in recent weeks and follows the expansion from a single project, GlusterFS, into multiple projects under the Gluster Community umbrella.

The seven charter board members include DataLab USA, Hortonworks, Inc., Intel Corp., The Linux Foundation, NTT PC Communications, Inc., Open Source Lab at Oregon State University, and Red Hat.

The Gluster Community Board will serve to govern the community and provide guidance for the community at large and and consists of representatives from each of the charter member organizations and individual community contributors. The board will decide which projects reach the milestones required for inclusion in the official Gluster Software Distribution and identify areas of innovation to address open technology advancements of open software-defined storage.

The board will also manage the Gluster Community’s expansion into a multi-project open source community and software distribution through the recently-available Gluster Community Forge, a collaborative development web site where like-minded developers and organizations can incubate, develop and collaborate on new open software-defined storage projects. Developers in individual projects will independently manage their roadmaps, development, and implementation.

Ramon Selga, CEO, Datalab, said: "We have been deploying GlusterFS and seeing its evolution since 2011. Now we have started to contribute to the project with new Gluster related components and tools, and we are happy to see that, thanks to the Gluster Community Board, all these additions as well as contributions from others will be globally coordinated as a whole, expanding GlusterFS to a broader audience and strengthening collaboration with other open source projects. We are very proud to become a member of the Gluster Community Board."

Marc Holmes, community director, Hortonworks, said: "I’m thrilled to work with the Gluster community as it continues to work to push the boundaries of community-driven approaches to distributed file systems. At Hortonworks, we’re passionate about community-driven open source and it is exciting to see the continued growth and impact of those efforts everywhere."

Girish Juneja, CTO, datacenter software division, Intel, said: "We are pleased to join the Gluster open source community. As an active contributor to open source projects such as Hadoop and OpenStack that enable data processing and storage at a massive scale, Intel intends to support the Gluster community efforts in advancing innovation and supporting customer choice in file systems for cloud computing and big data."

Amanda McPherson, VP marketing and developer programs, The Linux Foundation, said: "The Gluster Community is doing important, collaborative development work to advance open software-defined storage, and we are happy to provide guidance and support. By hosting collaboration activities such as the recent Gluster Workshop at LinuxCon Japan we hope to help provide essential forums to facilitate some of this work."

Keisuke Takahashi, engineer, NTTPC, said: "I am a long-time Gluster Community contributor, since 2007. With the expanded Gluster Community, everyone can create open software-defined storage systems and free ourselves from proprietary storage hardware. Let’s re-define the storage ecosystem of the world."

John Mark Walker, Gluster Community lead, Red Hat, said: "This expansion is a testament to the Gluster Community’s rapid growth into a standardized open source platform for open software defined storage development. As the number of incubating projects grows, expanded governance and Gluster development forge the Gluster community into a center for open innovation."