Gluster

Overview

Gluster was a software company best known for developing GlusterFS, an open-source, scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) file system. The company is associated with India through its co-founders and engineering presence, and it was acquired by Red Hat in 2011, after which GlusterFS continued as a community-driven project under Red Hat's stewardship.

Key facts

Background

Gluster was founded by Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy and Hitesh Chellani to address the problem of building large, commodity-hardware-based storage clusters without dependence on proprietary appliances. The company's core technology, GlusterFS, aggregates storage from multiple servers into a single global namespace, which can be exported over protocols such as NFS, SMB and a native Gluster client.

A distinctive design choice in GlusterFS is the absence of a centralised metadata server; file placement is determined algorithmically using an elastic hashing approach. This allows the system to scale horizontally to petabyte-class deployments while avoiding a single point of bottleneck.

History

• Early development: GlusterFS originated as an open-source project, with significant engineering carried out in India alongside operations in the United States.
• Commercial offerings: Gluster, Inc. provided commercial support and storage software products built on the GlusterFS core, targeting enterprise customers seeking alternatives to traditional NAS vendors.
• Acquisition (2011): Red Hat announced the acquisition of Gluster, integrating the technology into its open-source storage portfolio. The product was subsequently offered as Red Hat Storage Server, later rebranded as Red Hat Gluster Storage.
• Post-acquisition: The upstream project continued to be developed openly at gluster.org, with contributions from Red Hat engineers and the wider community.

Technology

GlusterFS is implemented in user space using FUSE on Linux clients and is built around a stackable "translator" architecture, where features such as replication, distribution, striping, encryption and caching are composed as modular layers. Common deployment modes include:

• Distributed volumes – files are spread across bricks for capacity scaling.
• Replicated volumes – files are mirrored across bricks for high availability.
• Distributed-replicated volumes – combining the above for both scale and redundancy.
• Dispersed volumes – using erasure coding for storage efficiency.

Significance

Gluster is frequently cited as an example of an Indian-origin software start-up that produced widely used open-source infrastructure software and was acquired by a major global technology firm. GlusterFS has been deployed in cloud computing, media archives, scientific computing and as backing storage for container and virtualisation platforms, including integration with OpenStack and Kubernetes through projects such as Heketi and gluster-block.

Related topics

• Red Hat
• Ceph
• Network-attached storage
• Distributed file system
• Open-source software
• Indian software industry

References

• Wikidata entity: Q12014467
• Gluster community project documentation, gluster.org
• Red Hat product documentation for Red Hat Gluster Storage