Two leading cloud providers, Gluster and GoGrid, have formed a strategic partnership to deploy Gluster’s highly scalable NAS cloud storage technology within GoGrid’s cloud infrastructure.

"Gluster's storage technology is architected to meet the scalability and performance requirements of dynamic cloud environments and is complementary to GoGrid’s cloud infrastructure," said Jeffrey Samuels, chief marketing officer at GoGrid. "Our ability to enable businesses to deploy and begin managing existing or new applications in the cloud in near real-time, coupled with Gluster’s capabilities, provide our customers with a comprehensive solution option for effectively managing storage in their cloud environment."

Gluster is a leading provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions for private and public clouds, while GoGrid serves as a cloud hosting leader. By teaming together, customers can now start using a beta version of Gluster's software-only storage solutions via the Gluster GoGrid Sever Image, or Gluster GSI.

Gluster’s software-only platform is designed to aggregate storage resources in a unified pool with one global namespace has been deployed by thousands of enterprises.

The Gluster GSI packages the GlusterFS scale-out NAS file system in a GoGrid Server Image, enabling high performance, high availability and easily-managed shared storage in the GoGrid cloud infrastructure. The Gluster GSI is the only highly available scale-out file storage solution for GoGrid supporting asynchronous data replication with Gluster Geo-Replication and synchronous replication with Gluster N-way replication, according to company officials.

The Gluster GSI deploys in minutes on easily created GoGrid cloud server instances to form a clustered NAS fileserver within the GoGrid cloud, they added. Now, GoGrid customers will be able to more rapidly deploy scale-out NAS cloud storage to petabytes of capacity that is POSIX compliant. 

“The volume of unstructured data and the need for organizations to find an effective storage solution for cloud environments are on the rise,” said Lori Budin, vice president of channels and partnerships at Gluster. “GoGrid has shown great industry traction as a leading infrastructure as a service platform, and our partnership will allow customers to drastically improve storage economics in their cloud infrastructure. We are eagerly looking forward to exiting the beta period and the GSI being generally available later this summer.”

In other cloud storage news, StorSimple, a leading provider of Enterprise Cloud Storage for Windows and VMware infrastructures, was awarded the grand prize for Best of Show in the Product section at the 2011 Interop (News - Alert) Tokyo show, held June 7-10.

StorSimple was acclaimed for its product and cloud storage implementation; automatic tiering technology; deduplication technology; data protection and disaster recovery; and cloud encryption technology.

“Japan is a very demanding market that recognizes and values technical excellence. Receiving this award is a great honor and an acknowledgement of StorSimple as an industry leader both in the U.S. and now internationally,” said Ursheet Parikh, CEO of StorSimple. “This award is a reflection of our commitment to the Japanese market with our support for both global clouds such as Windows Azure and Amazon and local Japanese cloud vendors.”