GlusterFS is an open source, distributed file system capable of scaling to
several petabytes and handling thousands of clients. It is a file system with
a modular, stackable design, and an unique no-metadata server architecture which
ensures better performance, linear scalability, and reliability. GlusterFS can be
flexibly combined with commodity physical, virtual, and cloud resources
to deliver highly available and performant enterprise storage at a
fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.

GlusterFS is designed for today's high-performance, virtualized cloud
environments. Unlike traditional data centers, cloud environments
require multi-tenancy along with the ability to grow or shrink resources
on demand. Enterprises can scale capacity, performance, and availability
on demand, with no vendor lock-in, across on-premise, public cloud, and
hybrid environments.

##Key foundational features
*  Software only, runs on commodity hardware
*  Unified access
*  Largely POSIX compliant
*  No external metadata servers
*  Scale-out with Elasticity
*  Deployment agnostic
*  Extensible and modular

GlusterFS is in production at thousands of enterprises spanning media,
healthcare, government, education, web 2.0, and financial services.

## Commercial offerings and support ##

Several companies offer support or consulting - http://www.gluster.org/consultants/.

Red Hat Storage (http://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/storage/storage-server)
is a commercial storage software product, based on GlusterFS.
