Gluster Announces Apache Hadoop Storage Compatibility in Latest GlusterFS Release

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Gluster, the leading provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions, today announced the release of GlusterFS 3.3 beta 2 which includes compatibility for Apache Hadoop. This latest enhancement to GlusterFS uses the standard file system APIs available in Hadoop to provide a new storage option for Hadoop deployments. With this new feature, GlusterFS is the first open source, POSIX-compliant file and object storage solution that works with Hadoop. Compatible with existing MapReduce-based applications and with the ability to co-exist with HDFS, this new functionality opens up data within Hadoop deployments to any file- or object-based application, providing a broad new range of options for big data deployments.

“For Hadoop deployments, GlusterFS delivers on our overall theme of unifying storage environments into one single scale-out pool. We are delivering Hadoop users with a NAS storage alternative that seamlessly integrates and opens up the data to more users and applications while providing reliability and high performance.”

“As an open source, distributed storage solution designed to work on huge numbers of heterogeneous, commodity devices — Gluster is a perfect complement to the Hadoop ecosystem,” said Ben Golub, CEO of Gluster. “With this release organizations, can ensure their long term storage infrastructure is aligned with their long term, 'big data' infrastructure.”

Apache Hadoop is an open source software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications, such as search analytics, financial modeling, atmospheric science, genomics research and more. The Hadoop approach distributes both data and processing to large numbers of devices, enabling huge datasets to be efficiently managed and analyzed in parallel. Given this design, a petascale, open source, software only, distributed approach to storage is a far better fit for Hadoop deployments than proprietary, monolithic, big box approaches.

Eric Baldeschwieler, CEO at Hortonworks, a company formed by the key architects and core Hadoop committers from the Yahoo! Hadoop software engineering team in order to accelerate the development and adoption of Apache Hadoop, said, “Hortonworks is dedicated to ensuring Apache Hadoop becomes the standard platform for storing, processing, managing and analyzing big data. We are excited that Gluster is embracing Apache Hadoop and delivering incremental value to enterprises deploying Hadoop solutions by unifying their storage environments into a single scale-out pool.”

GlusterFS provides Hadoop deployments with a proven scale-out NAS solution in production at petabyte scale. Features and benefits include:

Fast access to data – with no centralized metadata or name server, GlusterFS delivers better performance and easier manageability, with no centralized point of failure;
N-way replication – synchronous and asynchronous replication enables users to replicate data, changes are tracked and queued to ensure data stays synchronized regardless of latency or potential network interruptions;
High-availability – GlusterFS includes built-in failover, self-healing and no single point of failure;
Increased flexibility in sizing – with Gluster, Hadoop deployments are no longer limited to large block sizes or 16 TB volume sizes;
POSIX-compliant NAS (NFS, CIFS) and object access to files within Hadoop deployments – with Gluster, big data deployments can now enable operating systems to directly mount the storage, making it much easier to get data into and out of the system;
Easy access – to both file and object storage which simplifies management and controls storage costs; and,
Open source – available under a GPLv3 open source license.

“GlusterFS is a natural fit for the Hadoop platform because it was designed as a petabyte scale file system for commodity hardware,” said AB Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster. “For Hadoop deployments, GlusterFS delivers on our overall theme of unifying storage environments into one single scale-out pool. We are delivering Hadoop users with a NAS storage alternative that seamlessly integrates and opens up the data to more users and applications while providing reliability and high performance.”

Gluster will be hosting a webinar, "What's new in GlusterFS 3.3" on Tuesday, August 30 at 2 p.m. ET. To register for the event visit https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/155968278.

Product Availability

GlusterFS 3.3 beta 2 is available now. To participate in the public beta simply visit our 3.3 beta resource page: http://bit.ly/nUtssL. To sign up as an official beta site, contact glusterfs3.3beta@gluster.com or info@gluster.com.

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About Gluster Technology

Gluster’s software-only solutions have let thousands of enterprises deploy storage the same way they deploy computing today — as a virtualized, commoditized, and scale-on-demand pool, radically improving storage economics. Combined with the customer’s choice of commodity computing and storage resources, Gluster can scale-out to petabytes of capacity and GB/s of throughput at a fraction of the cost of proprietary systems. Gluster ensures high availability with n-way replication both within and between public and private data centers. Gluster is deployable both on-premise (as a virtual appliance or bare-metal software appliance) and in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services. Gluster is the primary author and maintainer of the open source GlusterFS software, which has been downloaded over 200,000 times.

About Gluster

Gluster is the leading provider of open source storage solutions for public, private and hybrid clouds. Thousands of organizations have deployed GlusterFS worldwide. Gluster has over 150 customers using GlusterFS in commercial deployments ranging from a few terabytes to multiple petabytes, across the most demanding applications in digital media delivery, healthcare, Internet, energy and biotech. Gluster is privately-held and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Visit us at www.gluster.com.