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Red Hat Acquiring Cloud Storage Company Gluster
Julie188 writes "One of the more interesting aspects of Red Hat's acquisition of virtual storage vendor Gluster on Tuesday is how it drags Red Hat into bed with its cloud competitor OpenStack. Red Hat made waves over the summer in the open source community when one of its executives threw punches at OpenStack's community, saying the community amounted to not much more than a bunch of press releases. In July, Gluster contributed its Connector for OpenStack. It enables features such as live migration of VMs, instant boot of VMs, and movement of VMs between clouds on a GlusterFS environment. While Fedora has already said that its upcoming Fedora 16 would support OpenStack, Fedora is a community distro and not beholden to Red Hat. However, Red Hat today promised that it would continue to support and maintain Gluster's contribution to OpenStack. It didn't, however, to promise to quit the smack talk."
This is great news, Redhat will keep it open source. I'm glad Oracle didn't get their hands on it and commercialize it like they did MySQL (The commercial plugins in 5.5.16 is what I'm referencing). I much prefer Redhat's approach.
So OpenStack is a hypervisor independent private cloud API. Its corporate backers include Rackspace, NASA, and Dell. There is a similar competing product called CloudStack, by Citrix. The Citrix CloudStack team has integrated a number of OpenStack components into their own product, and have contributed code back to OpenStack as well.
As far as I know, RHEV does not compete with either of those products head on. RHEV is for managing kvm, and maybe xen, hypervisor(s). It is primarily a management frontend for RedHat's supported hypervisors. While CloudStack and OpenStack are Amazon-like private cloud APIs which support a number of different vendors' hypervisors.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
Maybe it will become part of the RHEL distro now, instead of the insane support contracts they had, at $800/node per year for 5 email support calls. For a FS that works better on more nodes... we quickly went running when they told us the costs. That kind of support doesn't work well on a cluster.
Best part of acquisition: Gluster fsck
Unfortunately not it would seem according to this.
As your volume size grows beyond 32TBs, fsck (filesystem check) downtime becomes a huge problem. GlusterFS has no fsck. It heals itself transparently with very little impact on performance.