Governance/Proposed/OpenStack Cloud Storage (Gluster)

Describe Governance/Proposed/OpenStack Cloud Storage (Gluster) here.

Gluster creates a unified cloud storage environment consisting of multi-protocol POSIX compatible elastic file storage, S3-compatible object storage, and HDFS-compatible big data storage. Gluster's continuous geographic replication combined with the unified cloud storage environment enables OpenStack to unify private and public clouds.

For VM images, Gluster brings VMware's vMotion like capabilities to OpenStack. Unlike VMWare's VMFS, Gluster can scale to petabytes and is easy to configure. Gluster is implemented as a pure software-based storage stack that does not require expensive SAN hardware, instead leveraging the enterprise's choice of DAS/JBOD/SAN. This allows OpenStack users and developers to build amazon-like cloud storage (both S3 and file) easily, seamlessly and cost-effectively.

For application data, POSIX-compatible elastic file storage enables enterprise applications to seamlessly migrate into the cloud without requiring application re-writes. It is much easier to treat unstructured data as files and folders, thereby creating the platform for OpenStack to eliminate barriers to adoption.

Gluster's HDFS-compatible big data storage enables the Apache-Hadoop stack and all of the big data applications to be instantly compatible with OpenStack without any modifications. Unlike HDFS, Gluster allows you to run Mapreduce jobs without the metadata scalability and block size limitation inherent in HDFS.