GlusterFS Distributed Filesystem

GlusterFS (Gluster File System) is an open-source, scalable, distributed filesystem that aggregates disk storage from multiple servers into a single global namespace. Originally developed by Gluster Inc. (founded by Anand Babu Periasamy in 2005) and acquired by Red Hat in 2011 for 136 million USD, GlusterFS is now maintained by Red Hat and the community. Key features: scale-out architecture aggregating storage from multiple commodity servers into a single filesystem, scaling linearly by adding nodes. Elastic volume manager for dynamically adding, removing, and rebalancing bricks without service interruption. Synchronous file replication across multiple bricks for high availability with configurable replica count. File distribution across bricks using consistent hashing for horizontal capacity scaling. Erasure coding using Reed-Solomon for space-efficient redundancy. POSIX compliance via FUSE mount enabling transparent application access. Geo-replication for asynchronous disaster recovery using rsync over SSH. NFS and SMB export for legacy client access. Per-directory and per-volume disk quotas for multi-tenant environments. Point-in-time volume snapshots using thin-provisioned LVM. Bitrot detection via checksums for detecting silent data corruption. POSIX permissions, ACLs, and IP-based access control. Supports thousands of nodes and petabytes of storage.