Red Hat's Gluster gets a community project forge

The GlusterFS distributed filesystem community is expanding to take in a range of other storage-related, and generally Gluster-related, projects. The change was announced by Red Hat, who acquired Gluster Inc, the company behind the cloud/cluster-oriented distributed filesystem, in October 2011. Since then, Red Hat has maintained the Gluster Community at Gluster.org while marketing the GlusterFS software as its Storage Server.

The community has been focused on the GlusterFS software, but now the community site will play host to a range of projects hosted in the Gluster Forge. The flagship project is, of course, the GlusterFS Core, but now classed as "incubating" at the forge are projects such as pmux (a Ruby-based MapReduce system that runs on a GlusterFS platform), gflocator (a file location daemon for GlusterFS), Samba-Gluster integration, a HDFS plugin (so that GlusterFS can stand in or alongside Hadoop's HDFS) and Dispersed Volume (a RAID5/6-styled GlusterFS volume).

The new structure should provide a more accessible way of viewing the progress of the various projects which make up the Gluster ecosystem. Whether it will increase the transparency or open up the governance of the project is unclear though; the community is still directly run by Red Hat. GlusterFS itself is a robust, active project – the first beta of version 3.4 is expected on 7 May and the community is invited to join in testing in a 24-hour "GlusterFest".

(djwm)