Red Hat buys Gluster | Hacker News Reader

Red Hat buys Gluster

redhat.com

43 pointsjwildeboer10 comments

Storage solutions absed on Open find their real home, as it seems. Congrats!

This is pretty awesome news. I've been running GlusterFS on my guild hosting system for coming on 4 years or so. While I haven't followed the project terribly closely, hearing RedHat has acquired it is good news for the longevity of the project. I never quite knew how well known or high profile it was, and always wondered if it would be abandoned.

This makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. thumbs up

Personally I am happy to see a company make solid money creating good technical products. Especially open source code. 136 million $ in cash for an Open Source company is pretty sweet. Gluster has some awesome people and they deserve their success.

Yeah, and if anyone is going to buy it and not ruin the open-source product, it's redhat. I mean, I'm not happy with their recent decision to release the kernel as one giant blob of code rather than the upstream plus patches, but RedHat is still worlds better (as a steward of an open-source product) than any other corporation with the resources to drop that kind of scratch.

Besides the other reasons given, Red Hat's HekaFS cloud filesystem is based on GlusterFS.

$136M is a lot of money for a distributed file system. Can anyone compare GlusterFS to HDFS? I think they're booth GoogleFS clones but I'm not sure on the details except that HDFS uses a name node and is written in Java.

> Can anyone compare GlusterFS to HDFS? I think they're booth GoogleFS clones but I'm not sure on the details except that HDFS uses a name node and is written in Java.

I don't think GlusterFS is GoogleFS clone. As far as I know HDFS isn't meant to be a mountable file system. GlusterFS is a near POSIX-compliant FS that can be mounted with FUSE. The FUSE mounts are then exported via NFS or CIFS. At least that is how it was 2 years ago when I tried it. I think NFS is now a native export option of GlusterFS volumes via the NFS Translator. In my mind GlusterFS is more like Isilon than HDFS.

I don't really like the fact that GlusterFS is in user-space. I think Ceph is a more promising project: http://ceph.newdream.net/

Having GlusterFS in user space gave us a lot of advantages (development cycle time, bugs not panicking the kernel etc) ... besides in a distributed scale out architecture doing things in kernel or user space does not make much of a difference for performance as either network or the disks become the bottleneck.

As you mentioned the storage volume can be mounted via NFS too.

They're not really directly comparable. GlusterFS implements standard POSIX semantics and is directly mountable on a client. On the backend it can use another file system (ext, XFS, etc) where it actually stores the data. It's highly configurable in a variety of different server distribution schemes similar to RAID levels you'd use on local disk.

GLusterFS 3.3 even supports the HDFS API.

http://www.gluster.com/community/documentation/index.php/3.3...

$136M is a really good deal for a distributed file system that actually works and is used by many thousands of companies.

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