infoTECH Feature

July 29, 2011

Gluster's Trainer: The Importance of True Cloud Architecture

At the recently-concluded Cloud Expo 2011 Expo in Manhattan, Tom Trainer, director of Product Marketing at Gluster, sat for an interview with TMC CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert).

In early July TMC’s Carrie Schmelkin wrote that cloud providers Gluster and GoGrid formed a partnership to deploy Gluster’s NAS cloud storage technology within GoGrid’s cloud infrastructure.

“Gluster's storage technology is architected to meet the scalability and performance requirements of 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 manage existing or new applications in the cloud, coupled with Gluster’s capabilities, provide our customers with an option for managing storage in the cloud.”

Trainer positioned the company’s offerings as “a better way to do storage, particularly for the cloud.” He noted that “typical customers” would include those companies experiencing the explosion of unstructured content, such as Pandora (News - Alert). Basically, he said, their customers found that deploying file servers in the cloud gave them the ability to meet their SLAs “in the cloud, with a lot of headroom to spare.”

Performance is always a topic of discussion, Trainer said, adding that in the public cloud performance tends to bottleneck, being generally faster in a private cloud. They also address security, Trainer said, explaining how instead of bolting it on, they build it in from the ground up.

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, Schmelkin noted.

Trainer also said they see some of the older, established companies trying to reposition their products as “cloud” when they really might be better described as something else, explaining how one can tell the difference and what it might mean to performance.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.


David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Jennifer Russell
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