Gluster Joins the Trailblazer Initiative by ARM Server Chip Firm Calxeda

Gluster, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based provider of open source storage solutions, announced it has joined the Calxeda Trailblazer Initiative, an industry ecosystem of companies dedicated to improving server and data center efficiency. 

Through this initiative, Calxeda, the ARM (News - Alert) server chip startup firm, is laying the groundwork for an ARM-based server ecosystem, according to a news report. The initiative brings together industry partners to provide software and service support ahead of hardware availability.

The Trailblazer initiative is intended to open up Calxeda's technology to interested hardware vendors, systems integrators, datacenter operators and software vendors. The company is trying to address the demand from customers and partners to get its chips into servers and datacenters.

As the first step, the company has given partner access to early silicon for Proof of Concept testing, expected this fall. As a Trailblazer, Gluster will be among the first to begin proof of concept testing. 

“As volumes of information increase daily, storage continues to be the Holy Grail.  Gluster’s scale-out NAS approach for cloud and virtual machine environments combined with Calxeda's scale-out architecture will be a formidable player in all things datacenter storage,” said Barry Evans, CEO, Calxeda, in a statement.

“Collaborating, as we will do with Gluster as an early member of Trailblazer, will enable our two companies to make the datacenter of the future real in the very near term,” Evans added.

To leverage this opportunity, Trailblazer partners will work with Calxeda and accelerate adoption of hyper-efficient servers. This will give them an opportunity to be part of a rich ecosystem that end users will benefit from by ultimately delivering full systems faster. 

“The trend towards low-power and hyper-efficient compute resources matches what we are seeing in the storage market,” said AB Periasamy, founder and CTO, Gluster, in a statement. “Organizations want to reduce costs associated with compute and storage infrastructure while maximizing performance and we are pleased to be participating in the Calxeda Trailblazer program.”

As a Trailblazer, Calxeda will provide Gluster with early access to hardware, operating system software, tools, applications and joint sales and marketing, company officials said. Gluster will also receive first updates on valuable benchmarking and technical information.

The association will help the entire ecosystem deliver complete systems to end users faster, improving datacenter efficiency.  Powered by Calxeda’s high-performance, low-power ARM chips, these new servers and next generation data centers will help solve the energy consumption crisis, and will significantly increase efficiency and save money for users along the way, the company said.

Gluster delivers an open storage software platform focused on simplifying the task of storing and managing the explosive growth of unstructured data. Recently the company announced it has been awarded Best of Show for the Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance for Xen at the Citrix Synergy (News - Alert) Conference.