Gluster Delivers First Software-Only Unified File and Object Storage Technology

Gluster, a provider of open source storage solutions for public, private and hybrid clouds, announced the beta release of GlusterFS 3.3.

Gluster is used by hundreds of enterprises worldwide. Available on-premise, for virtual machines, and in public and private cloud environments, Gluster's software-only storage technology is noted to deliver the first true unified file and object data storage. Users can now have simultaneous access to data as a file and as an object, delivering the benefits of both, said the company official.

“Traditional object storage technologies have not been widely deployed because their approach has not integrated well with legacy applications – leaving 95 percent of those applications unable to easily migrate to the cloud. Additionally, NAS has been unable to scale across the Internet to the public cloud. GlusterFS 3.3 takes a unified approach via full integration of file and object storage within the file system,” AB Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster, said in a press release.

“We are the first to solve both the NAS scaling and legacy application integration with object storage problems. We listen carefully to our customers and community and we are excited to deliver this next step of unified storage technology for virtual and cloud environments,” Periasamy added.

Gluster’s release indicated that the latest version of its innovative file system provides a system for data storage that enables users to access the same data as an object and as a file, simplifying management and controlling storage costs. GlusterFS 3.3 allows users to access data as objects from an Amazon S3 compatible interface and access files from a NAS interface including NFS and CIFS. In addition to decreasing cost and making it faster and easier to access object data, GlusterFS also delivers massive scalability, high availability and replication of object storage.

For infrastructure as a service offerings, GlusterFS 3.3 enables organizations to build their own Amazon-like storage offering for their customers. Enterprises can use GlusterFS to accelerate the process of preparing applications for the cloud, simplify new application development for cloud computing environments, and backup from data center unified file and object to Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) or within the private cloud.

 Infrastructure service providers can use GlusterFS 3.3 to offer access to both file and object storage, and enterprises will be able to use this latest release to ease the migration of legacy, file-based applications to object storage for use in the cloud. GlusterFS is packaged in an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for deployment in the AWS cloud.

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.

Gluster recently announced the appointment of Rob Bearden to its board of directors.