Introducing GlusterFS 3.3
Today, we’re announcing the next generation of GlusterFS, version 3.3. The release has been a year in the making and marks several firsts: the first post-acquisition release under Red Hat, our first major act as an openly-governed project and our first foray beyond NAS. We’ve also taken our first steps towards merging big data and unstructured data storage, giving users and developers new ways of managing their data scalability challenges.
GlusterFS is an open source, fully distributed storage solution for the world’s ever-increasing volume of unstructured data. It is a software-only, highly available, scale-out, centrally managed storage pool that can work with POSIX filesystems that support extended attributes, such as Ext3/4, XFS, BTRFS and many more.
This release provides many of the most commonly requested features including proactive self-healing, quorum enforcement, and granular locking for self-healing, as well as many additional bug fixes and enhancements.
Some of the more noteworthy features include:
- Unified File and Object storage – Blending OpenStack’s Object Storage API with GlusterFS provides simultaneous read and write access to data as files or as objects.
- HDFS compatibility – Gives Hadoop administrators the ability to run MapReduce jobs on unstructured data on GlusterFS and access the data with well-known tools and shell scripts.
- Proactive self-healing – GlusterFS volumes will now automatically restore file integrity after a replica recovers from failure.
- Granular locking – Allows large files to be accessed even during self-healing, a feature that is particularly important for VM images.
- Replication improvements – With quorum enforcement you can be confident that your data has been written in at least the configured number of places before the file operation returns, allowing a user-configurable adjustment to fault tolerance vs performance.
Visit http://www.gluster.org to download. Packages are available for most distributions, including Fedora, Debian, RHEL, Ubuntu and CentOS.
Get involved! Join us on #gluster on freenode, join our mailing list, ‘like’ our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter, or check out our LinkedIn group.
GlusterFS is an open source project sponsored by Red Hat®, who uses it in its line of Red Hat Storage products.