Gluster

Gluster Inc., founded in 2005, established itself as a key player in the open-source storage market before its acquisition by Red Hat. The company was the commercial force behind GlusterFS, a software-defined, scale-out network-attached storage file system designed to run on commodity hardware. This approach allowed clients to build large, distributed storage solutions for data- and bandwidth-intensive tasks, such as digital media delivery and cloud computing, at a lower cost than traditional proprietary systems.

The company was co-founded by Anand Babu (A.B.) Periasamy and Hitesh Chellani. Periasamy, the original author of GlusterFS and the company's CTO, and Chellani, the CEO, met while working at California Digital, where they were part of the team that built the 'Thunder' supercomputer. Their journey began with an ambitious goal to simplify storage using open-source software and commodity hardware, an idea they developed over meetings at a Starbucks in Fremont, California. Starting in Chellani's home with a modest angel investment, they built the company with a development center in Bangalore, India, and headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. The firm secured funding from notable venture capital firms Index Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners.

Gluster's business model was centered on providing a commercially supported version of the open-source GlusterFS platform. The core product, GlusterFS, virtualizes disk and memory resources from multiple servers into a single global namespace, creating a unified storage pool. This architecture eliminates metadata servers, relying on an elastic hashing algorithm, which enables dynamic scaling of performance and capacity from terabytes to petabytes. The company targeted enterprises struggling with large volumes of unstructured data in datacenter, virtualized, and cloud environments, with clients including notable companies like Pandora and Box.net.

A significant milestone in the company's history was its acquisition by Red Hat in October 2011 for approximately $136 million in cash. This event marked a successful exit for the founders and investors, integrating Gluster's technology into Red Hat's portfolio as Red Hat Gluster Storage. Following the acquisition, Red Hat became the primary maintainer of the GlusterFS open-source project. The technology eventually entered a retirement lifecycle phase, with support ending on December 31, 2024.

Keywords: open source storage, scale-out NAS, distributed file system, GlusterFS, unstructured data, cloud storage, software-defined storage, Red Hat acquisition, Anand Babu Periasamy, Hitesh Chellani