CAMBRIDGE, M.A. – FAS Research Computing (FASRC) has signed a letter of intent to join the Gluster Community Board, the leading community for open software-defined storage. James Cuff, Assistant Dean for Research Computing at Harvard University, will represent FASRC. The board is comprised of individuals and organization representatives committed to the success of the GlusterFS project as well as the success of related projects and the Gluster Community as a whole.
GlusterFS is a scalable open source distributed filesystem capable of managing thousands of clients. The system is designed to provide network storage that can be made redundant, fault-tolerant and scalable. FASRC has one of the largest known deployments of GlusterFS in the world, pushing GlusterFS beyond previously established limits. FASRC involvement in testing and development has been central to advancing the usability and stability of GlusterFS.
“As long term advocates of both open source, and open science initiatives at scale, Research Computing is particularly excited to participate on the Gluster Community Governing Board. We really look forward to further accelerating science and discovery through this important and vibrant community collaboration,” said Cuff.
FASRC is joining the Gluster Community as open-source storage software is redefining how organizations think about storage. As Gluster’s base code is free and open-source, it provides users with a customizable and affordable alternative to traditional and expensive proprietary software. Gluster’s appeal is evident. Monthly downloads of GlusterFS have tripled since the beginning of 2013, and traffic to gluster.org has increased by over 50% from the previous year. There are now 45 projects on the Gluster Forge and over 200 developers, with integrations either completed or in the works for OpenStack Swift, CloudStack, OpenStack Cinder, Ganeti, Archipelago, Xen, QEMU/KVM, Ganesha and SAMBA.
In addition to FASRC, Citirix, Inc. will also be joining the Gluster Community Board. “The additions of Citrix and Harvard FASRC to the Gluster Community show that we continue to build momentum in the software-defined storage space. With the continuing integration with all cloud and big data technologies, including the Xen Hypervisor and CloudStack, we are building the default platform for modern data workloads,” said John Mark Walker, Gluster Community Leader.
Current board members include Xavier Hernandez of DataLab, Marc Holmes of Hortonworks, Vin Sharma of Intel, Jim Zemlin of The Linux Foundation, Keisuke Takahashi of NTTPC, Lance Albertson of The Open Source Lab at Oregon State University, John Mark Walker of Red Hat, Louis Zuckerman of Picture Marketing, Joe Julian of Ed Wyse & CO., Theron Conrey of Facebook, and Anand Avati of Red Hat.
