# What is Gluster ?

Gluster is a scalable, distributed file system that aggregates disk storage resources from multiple servers into a single global namespace.

### Advantages

- Scales to several petabytes
- Handles thousands of clients
- POSIX compatible
- Uses commodity hardware
- Can use any ondisk filesystem that supports extended attributes
- Accessible using industry standard protocols like NFS and SMB
- Provides replication, quotas, geo-replication, snapshots and bitrot detection
- Allows optimization for different workloads
- Open Source

![640px-glusterfs_architecture](../images/640px-GlusterFS-Architecture.png)

Enterprises can scale capacity, performance, and availability on demand, with no vendor lock-in, across on-premise, public cloud, and hybrid environments.
Gluster is used in production at thousands of organisations spanning media, healthcare, government, education, web 2.0, and financial services.

### Commercial offerings and support

Several companies offer support or [consulting](https://www.gluster.org/support/).

[Red Hat Gluster Storage](http://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/storage/gluster)
is a commercial storage software product, based on Gluster.