Congratulations to the Gluster Community! In addition to shipping GlusterFS 3.4, the latest release of the open source, scale-out storage system, the Gluster Community has significantly increased its number of projects and contributing developers in just three short months. Since May 2013, the Gluster Community has grown from seven projects for the GlusterFS distribution to more than 30 incubating open software-defined storage projects for big data, demonstrating nearly 300 percent growth in the number of developers.

As an open source community, the Gluster Community was created to drive open software-defined storage. The growth was enabled in part by recent important developments in the Gluster Community, including the introduction of Gluster Community Forge and the formation of The Gluster Community Board that includes eight leading organizations and technology providers in the storage and big data markets. The Gluster Community Forge is a collaborative development web site where like-minded developers and organizations can incubate, develop and collaborate on new open software-defined storage projects. The Gluster Community Forge also helps developers in individual projects independently manage their roadmaps, development, and implementation.

Now available for download, GlusterFS 3.4 offers KVM/QEMU integration, higher performance, and cloud enhancements to provide high reliability, scalability, and data mobility to enterprise users and application developers worldwide.

For virtualization, GlusterFS 3.4 features include QEMU integration with libgfapi, a new Block Device translator, and general performance enhancements for VM image storage for KVM. A new virtualization management user interface, oVirt 3.2, is available with its RESTful API gateway for integration with additional management tools.

For security, GlusterFS 3.4 now supports Server Quorum, SSL encryption, and a multi-threaded Glusterd that also added operating version support. Quorum enables split-brain prevention and resolution for replicated volumes. Security features include support for SSL-based encryption of "in-flight" data, and NFSv3 ACLs, WORM (write once, read many) volume types. The multi-threaded Glusterd allows for better scaling and higher performance, and operating version support for Glusterd enables easier, rolling upgrades and using multiple versions of GlusterFS.

The Gluster Community also recently announced that GlusterFS is OpenStack-ready. This is primarily due to the work started in 2012 with the OpenStack community focused on how OpenStack cloud developers and operators can use GlusterFS to support the three primary OpenStack storage modes. Instructions for using GlusterFS with OpenStack are now documented for the native OpenStack storage interfaces Swift, Cinder, and Glance. This allows OpenStack application developers and service providers to gain the benefits of Gluster's scale-out storage software.

Its an exciting time for the Gluster Community. Again, kudos to the Gluster Community for shipping GlusterFS 3.4 while it greatly expands its project scope, allowing participants to continue to drive open source sofware-defined storage innovation.

Here's how you can get more background:

• For more information on the Gluster Community, visit www.gluster.org
• To download GlusterFS 3.4, visit download.gluster.org.
• To download GlusterFS 3.4 release notes, visit github.com/gluster/
• To interact with The Gluster Community on Twitter, follow @GlusterOrg.

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