Red Hat has JBOSS, Fedora, OpenShift and now Gluster. The distributed storage technology is now Red Hat’s  new pillar for offering storage as a stand alone software or virtual appliance and as part of Red Hat’s core products. Later this month, Red Hat Gluster will release its Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtual appliance. And  later this year, Gluster will get added to OpenShift.

Gluster’s significant status with Red Hat shows how the storage market will evolve this year and the opportunity it brings for Red Hat. It’s a safe bet to say the storage market will grow unabated.  App development will fuel the need as unstructured data swallows resources and drives higher costs. Underneath will come the maturing of flash memory and sophisticated SSDs for scaling the data volume both in and out of services and corporate infrastructures. That will help increase capacity and consequently allow for more data intensive applications.

In the storage ecosystem, distributed storage is increasingly popular due to its relative low cost compared to big systems like those from EMC.

Last week I spoke with John Kreisa, director of storage marketing at Red Hat. Kreisa came from Gluster after its acquisition by Red Hat this Fall for $134 million. Previous to Gluster, Kreisa worked at Cloudera as its vice president of marketing.

That connection to Cloudera provides some context about Gluster. Like Hadoop, Gluster is a distributed storage environment. It scales horizontally on commodity servers, which more and more really does reflect what the cloud should be. Easy to use. Simple to scale. And dependable. David Floyer makes the point that Gluster’s secret sauce is not in its file system but in its hashtag algorithm, which keeps the metadata with the data object. Floyer writes that “clients can calculate where the data required is stored in the global system. This hashing algorithm allows the GlusterFS to store the metadata with the object and avoids the metadata bottlenecks of some global namespace file systems.” Bingo.

With a single name space, storage can overflow into other systems. That’s the advantage of using AWS with Gluster. The data can flow from a private data center into AWS across its distributed infrastructure.

For OpenShift, Gluster will provision a storage layer through APIs. With OpenShift, customers can use Gluster to develop apps on the Java-based platform and connect to data from different sources be it from the enterprise or, I imagine, from a Hadoop cluster on Amazon Elastic MapReduce.

This is enticing combination. Companies are still pretty much Java shops. And Hadoop is gaining in popularity. Gluster serves as an alternative to Hadoop’s file system with one major advantage. Hadoop Distributed File System has a single point of failure with its NameNode. Gluster does not.

Gluster FS will remain an open-source project, similar in theme to Fedora. Downstream Red Hat will offer its commercial versions. Those include the Gluster Software Appliance and Gluster Virtual Appliance.

Red Hat has a fantastic offering with Gluster.  It had general, wide acceptance before its acquisition. Its 150 customers included Pandora and Box, showing its appeal to Web companies. And that puts the company in a different space than let’s say VMware, which does not provide storage but  is trying to become an infrastructure play. Try as they may, VMware is not considered a company that Web companies flock to for its infrastructure. They have plenty of corporate clients but Web service providers will remain elusive. The exception is Cloud Foundry, which I believe will eventually force VMware to adopt or acquire its own distributed storage environment. Cloud Foundry currently relies on AWS for its distributed storage. I wonder how this is all playing with EMC?

More so, a company like Scality looks like a competitive force. We’ll take a look at the company in our next post in the Storage Wars.