[August 25, 2011] Gluster Touts Apache Hadoop Storage Compatibility in Latest GlusterFS Release Tweet Aug 26, 2011 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- Gluster, a provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions, announced the release of GlusterFS 3.3 beta 2, which includes compatibility for Apache Hadoop. The Company said 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 an 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. "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." According to a release, 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 numbers of devices, enabling huge datasets to be 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 scale-out NAS solution in production at petabyte scale. Features and benefits, as described by the Company, include: -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; -Access - to both file and object storage which helps with 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's software-only solutions have let thousands of enterprises deploy storage the same way they deploy computing - as a virtualized, commoditized, and scale-on-demand pool, radically improving storage economics. Gluster is a provider of open source storage solutions for public, private and hybrid clouds. More information: www.gluster.com ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]