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The latest version, suitable for dynamic cloud and data environments, lets data elastically grow, shrink, or migrate across physical machines in a cluster, without downtime or service interruptions, according to Gluster. Administrators can make storage volume configuration changes as needed for performance tuning or to adapt to workflow changes, the company said.

"The new capabilities in Gluster Storage Platform allow us to better address the dynamic storage requirements of modern cloud and data center environments," said Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster. "What Gluster Storage Platform does incredibly well is provide an easy to use, cost-effective and efficient storage platform that addresses the needs of data centers today and is also architected to grow with them as their networks and needs evolve. The new capabilities in Gluster Storage Platform allow us to better address the dynamic storage requirements of modern cloud and data center environments."

The storage platform is available under the GNU Affero General Public License.

The Gluster Storage Platform, available now, features a new Gluster console manager that includes a command line interface, API and shell, merged into one interface. Administrators can use languages such as Python, Ruby or PHP to scrip a series of commands that are invoked through the command line. This new tool does not need any new APIs, and can be scripted out and rapidly automate any information inserted into the command line interface, thereby allowing cloud administrators with the ability to simply automate large-scale operations.

In addition, the platform includes a native network file system (NFS) v.3 module that lets storage servers communicate natively with NFS clients directly to any storage server in the cluster, and that simultaneously communicates NFS and the Gluster protocol.

Gluster 3.1 continues to offer high availability with file replication, enabling servers to survive hardware failures and self-heal to ensure virtual machines are always on. With Gluster Storage Platform, data access scales horizontally across multiple storage nodes, using automatic I/O scheduling and load-balancing, according to Gluster. The technology melds together open source software with commodity hardware to produce cost savings. Contact Gluster for pricing.

InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on the expanding profile of data deduplication. Download the report here (registration required).