Gluster Inc. (formerly known as Z RESEARCH[1][2][3]) was a software company that provided an open source platform for scale-out public and private cloud storage.

[7][8] Red Hat became the primary author and maintainer of the GlusterFS open-source project after acquiring the Gluster company in October 2011.

[9] Red Hat Gluster Storage is in the retirement phase of its lifecycle with a end of support life date of December 31, 2024.

A typical on-premises, or private cloud deployment will consist of GlusterFS installed as a virtual appliance on top of multiple commodity servers running hypervisors such as KVM, Xen, or VMware; or on bare metal.

It has found applications including cloud computing, streaming media services, and content delivery networks.

[17] GlusterFS aggregates various storage servers over Ethernet or Infiniband RDMA interconnect into one large parallel network file system.

The client may re-export a native-protocol mount, for example via the kernel NFSv4 server, SAMBA, or the object-based OpenStack Storage (Swift) protocol using the "UFO" (Unified File and Object) translator.

The GlusterFS server is intentionally kept simple: it exports an existing directory as-is, leaving it up to client-side translators to structure the store.

This allows GlusterFS to scale up to several petabytes on commodity hardware by avoiding bottlenecks that normally affect more tightly coupled distributed file systems.