GlusterFS review 2026: how this open-source distributed file system works, its history with Red Hat, current project status, features, pros, cons and…
GlusterFS is an open-source, scale-out distributed file system that pools storage from multiple commodity servers into a single large network file system, accessible over Ethernet or InfiniBand. It was created in 2005 by Gluster Inc., founded by Anand Babu Periasamy, and was acquired by Red Hat in October 2011 for a reported 136 million US dollars.
Red Hat sold it commercially as Red Hat Storage Server and later Red Hat Gluster Storage, but ended commercial support and disbanded its Gluster engineering team at the close of 2024. The project continues under reduced community maintenance rather than active corporate development.
GlusterFS has no centralized metadata server; it uses an elastic hashing algorithm to locate files across storage bricks, avoiding a single point of failure or metadata bottleneck as the cluster scales. Capacity is added simply by attaching new bricks to a volume.
The system supports replication for redundancy, geo-replication for cross-site disaster recovery, striping and distribution of files across nodes, snapshotting, and access via its native client, NFS, or SMB for compatibility with existing tooling.
GlusterFS is free, open-source software licensed primarily under GPLv3, with some components dual-licensed under GPLv2 or LGPLv3. There is no license fee to download, deploy or modify it.
Since Red Hat wound down its commercial Red Hat Gluster Storage product and support offering at the end of 2024, there is no official paid enterprise tier; adopters rely on community support channels and bear only their own hardware and administration costs.
Yes, but only through community effort. Red Hat ended commercial support for Red Hat Gluster Storage on 31 December 2024 and disbanded its engineering team, and upstream commit activity has fallen sharply since, though minor releases on the 10.x and 11.x lines continue.
Yes, GlusterFS is free, open-source software licensed under GPLv3 with some components dual-licensed under GPLv2 or LGPLv3. There is no cost to download, deploy or modify it.
GlusterFS was created in 2005 by Gluster Inc., founded by Anand Babu Periasamy, who wrote the initial version. Red Hat acquired Gluster in October 2011 for a reported 136 million US dollars.
GlusterFS is the open-source upstream project. Red Hat Gluster Storage was Red Hat's commercially supported distribution built on GlusterFS, but that commercial product's support lifecycle ended in December 2024.
Many teams now evaluate alternatives such as Ceph or Kubernetes-native storage systems for new deployments given GlusterFS's reduced development pace, though existing GlusterFS users continue running it in production.
No. GlusterFS uses an elastic hashing algorithm to locate data across storage bricks instead of a centralized metadata server, which avoids that architecture's single point of failure.