What is GlusterFS?
GlusterFS is an open source project by Gluster, which was acquired by Red Hat, Inc. in 2011. This acquisition does not mean that you have to acquire a Red Hat subscription or pay Red Hat to use it since, as previously mentioned, it is an open source project; therefore, you can freely install it, look at its source code, and even contribute to the project. Although Red Hat offers paid solutions based on GlusterFS, we will talk about the open source software (OSS) and project itself in this chapter.
The following diagram is the number of Contributors and Commits in the Gluster project:
To understand GlusterFS, we must understand how it differs from traditional storage. To do this, we need to understand the concepts behind SDS, including what GlusterFS is.
Traditional storage is an industry-standard storage array with proprietary software in it that is bound to the hardware vendor. All this restricts you to the following set of rules,set by your storage provider:
- Scalability limitations
- Hardware compatibility limitations
- Client-operating system limitations
- Configuration limitations
- Vendor lock-in