Open source storage platform company Gluster announced that Swedish hosting solutions provider City Network Hosting is using its storage solution to power its City Cloud offering – Sweden’s first IaaS platform. The offering launched after more than 15 months in beta, and has an existing customer base of over 500 companies.

“As City Cloud continues to grow, it relies heavily on the elastic scaling capabilities of storage. This reliance makes it necessary for storage to have extreme growth capacity, but most importantly to never sacrifice performance as that growth kicks in.”

One of Gluster’s main benefits is that it’s open source, making it much more affordable than proprietary alternatives. The offering does carry more features, including file replication capabilities facilitating high availability of data. Gluster also integrates Enomaly Elastic Computing, one of City Network Hosting’s requirements for the projects, and eliminates I/O bottlenecks. City Cloud is obviously a very attractive offering considering the sizable customer base it managed to gain, which is probably why the Swedish company also announced it intends to incorporate Gluster with all of its services – which also include shared and cloud hosting.

Gluster is a very notable presence in the open source cloud industry, and more recently in the OpenStack community. Rackspace’s open cloud initiative has gained a tremendous amount of momentum as more and more companies jump on the bandwagon, and Gluster is one of them. The latter also announced it will release the latest version of its code contribution at the OpenStack Developer Conference held in April 26.

In addition to expanding its partner base, Gluster also raised $8.5 million in its second round of funding. The round was led by Index Venture, with participation from Nexus Venture Partners.