Gluster has joined the OpenStack community. It is Gluster’s intention to develop enhancements to OpenStack Storage offerings that give users redundancy, unlimited scale and high availability.

OpenStack is a collection of open source technologies delivering a massively scalable cloud operating system, and it is supported by a global software community that is collaborating to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware. Gluster intends to expand its contributions beyond its initial OpenStack endeavors, with the goal of ultimately delivering virtual appliances that complement the OpenStack framework and deliver scale-out storage for the cloud. Notable participants and contributors include Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) and NASA.

The move reaffirms Gluster’s commitment to the cloud and follows last month’s introduction of the first scale-out storage virtual appliances for VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The virtual appliances for AWS allow users to create highly scalable shared storage and the only high availability storage on Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBD). The virtual appliances for VMware deploy simply in both cloud and on-premise storage. Recently, Gluster also announced a partnership with RightScale, enabling customers to use Gluster’s software-only storage solution to dynamically deploy and manage scalable storage in a RightScale cloud environment.

“OpenStack provides an open, common platform that gives cloud consumers choice and flexibility with their deployments. The OpenStack community is glad to have the contributions of innovative open source storage companies like Gluster that will help improve storage performance, scalability and management for OpenStack clouds,” said Stephen Spector, community manager for OpenStack.

“Gluster remains focused on giving customers high-performance, highly scalable, and highly available storage delivered with the flexibility and favorable economics of the cloud,” said Anand Babu Periasamy, Gluster founder and CTO. “Joining the OpenStack community will help us further that mission. OpenStack shares a common vision of delivering open source technology and supporting cloud standards so companies can take full advantage of the benefits of cloud computing.”

Gluster has already made its first code contribution to OpenStack. As an Openstack Sponsor, Gluster will not only make financial contributions, but will also be making additional code contributions that will help make storage and distributed file systems part of a fully integrated, fully open cloud stack. “We all saw the benefits that the open LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) brought to on-premise computing and the web,” said Periasamy. “By creating a similar open stack for the cloud, we can help spur similar innovations for public, private, and hybrid clouds.”

Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances are designed expressly for cloud and virtual machine (VM) environments. Using the appliances, enterprises gain the ability to treat physical storage as a virtualized, standardized and scale-on-demand pool in much the same way that they treat computing resources today. Such flexibility is especially powerful in dynamic environments like the cloud and can radically improve storage economics.

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