GlusterFS 3.6.0 is Alive!

Just in time for Halloween, GlusterFS 3.6.0 has been released. The newest release, as you would expect, is full of new features and new elements for stability.

GlusterFS, as you may know, is a general-purpose scale out distributed file system. It aggregates storage exports over network interconnects provide a single unified namespace, is stackable and completely in user space. GlusterFS is layered on disk file systems that support extended attributes.

Some highlights for GlusterFS 3.6.0 include:

• Better SSL support GlusterFS now enables SSL on both management and data connections, designed to provide sufficient security where security is a requirement.
• Erasure coding and
  • Erasure coding makes use of the new disperse translator, functionality that performs erasure coding across nodes.
• Volume snapshot
  • Volume snapshot provides a point in time copy of a Gluster volume. Since this is an online operation, file system data continues to be available.
• User serviceable snapshots
  • With user serviceable snapshots, users can access snapshots of GlusterFS volumes without requiring administrative intervention.

Documentation about major changes and features are also included in the ‘doc/features/` directory of GlusterFS repository.

There are also a number of experimental features in this release of GlusterFS 3.6.0. These include support for rdma volumes, support for NUFA translator, disk encryption and on wire compression and decompression.

More information can be found in the release notes and information on upgrading to the new release can be found here.

GlusterFS 3.6 continues the driving concept for Gluster, namely that storage should be simple. Kudos to the contributors and community members who together made this release more stable, more performance and more production ready.

So, take a look at the GlusterFS 3.60 release and get ready to help create the next great version of GlusterFS.