Gluster,  a startup that provides scale-out, open source storage solutions, announced that open source leader Rob Bearden has joined the company’s board of directors.  According to the Gluster’s press release, Bearden joins to support Gluster’s continued growth and offer guidance to help further develop its open source community. The goal of the appointment is for Bearden to bring insight to Gluster in order to accelerate the growth of its open source community.

Recently at the Hadoop Summit one of the big stories was the Yahoo letting the key Hadoop employees walk out to form HortonWorks.  Yahoo’s core Hadoop contributors have left the company to form their own startup called HortonWorks. HortonWorks has big time financing of about $20 million from Benchmark, and the company will be headed by be ex-Yahoo engineer manager Eric Baldeschwieler.

HortonWorks investor is one of the hottest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley – Benchmark Capital.  It was announced at Hadoop Summit that Rob Bearden joined Hortonworks from Benchmark to run the business as  president and chief operating officer.  Hortonworks is  in direct competition with Cloudera which is focused on adoption and maturation of Hadoop.  Cloudera is the clear market leader in commercializing Hadoop.  Cloudera is also funded by another leading venture capital firm Accel Partners.  It is important to note that one of Benchmark’s general partners Peter Fenton used to work at Accel Partners.

What’s interesting is that Bearden was the former COO of both SpringSource and JBOSS, both very successful open source ventures.  I requested to speak to Rob and he was not available for comment.

Rob bring to Gluster some more open source mojo.  Gluster has momentum lately.  If you want to know more about Gluster read this post by David Floyer, senior analyst at Wikibon.org. .

While some are saying that Gluster is offering another approach to a file system David Floyer says ” Gluster is not the file system, but a business model.”

Why Bearden and Gluster?  One Theory – Push Hortonworks

Benchmark clearly knows the open source game or do they?  I see Benchmark pushing the envelope with Hortonworks to change the game on Cloudera.  One angle that I see is that by having Bearden involved in Gluster he can use his influence in the open source “file system” or database war in order to change the game on Hadoop Distributed Files System (HDFS).  For Benchmark and Hortonworks the fastest way to do change things us is to spend as much money as possible on marketing, create FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) around HDFS and Mapreduce, and set up alliances that are key battle ground to where Hadoop is going. For now I will have to wait til next week to speak to Rob Bearden since he blew off an interview today.

Gluster Has Traction – A Solid Story

Regarding Gluster they have a solid story there and it’s worth paying attention to especially since Bearden in on the board.  Besides that they have interesting technology, great customers (Box.net, Partners Healthcare, Pandora), and great packaging for cloud story spanning public and private.  In addition Gluster has good partnerships with AWS and Rightscale which seems to be a competitive advantage at this point in that no one else seems to have those relationships.

Gluster also had some key hires recently Tom Trainer, Dir of Product Marketing and John Kreisa, VP Marketing, recently joined from Cloudera.  Here is an interview that we did with Tom Trainer at Citrix Synergy where Gluster won best of Synergy 2011.

My Notes on Gluster

• won best of Synergy 2011
• Positioning:  “Scale out storage for public and private clouds”
• Jack O’Brien left company for other pursuits
• storage should be a commoditized, virtualized and centrally managed pool…
• the “google model” of storage
• storage has become a software problem
• see open source as a key element of this
• approach = storage is a large managed pool of capacity, software only focus, port storage and file system capabilities to a # of different environments
• customer gets freedom of choice on hardware…could be cloud or data center
• hardware agnostic, full file system access, no encoding
• scale out capacity and scale up performance…each scale linearly, they have proof on performance analysis
• linear scale as more storage or NAS heads added into global namespace
• support adoption of cloud, help customers move to public cloud
• founded 2005, started shipping 2007, v3.2
• 60 employees…30 in CA and 30 in Bangalore
• partnerships include Amazon and Rightscale
• $12.5m funding, $8.5m round closed last November 2010
• Index and Nexus ventures
• biz model
• 200k downloads
• open source version available at http://gluster.orggluster.org
• turnkey very high performance, HA scale out NAS
• sell support on supported configurations
• sell cloud deployable versions thru AWS and Rightscale
• do OEM licensing agreements
• channel friendly sales model
• ships into channel as sw package
• Product
• GlusterFS
• open source scale out f/s for public and private cloud storage
• metadata free, no MD server or distributed MD…key component of architecture, major differentiation
• global namespace…not limited in node count like Isilon at 144
• posix compliant…no app code changes, not dealing with object store
• NAS…NFS, CIFS & GlusterFS protocol that is even faster than NFS and CIFS