Now that RedHat has purchased Gluster, and they are in the process of releasing their storage software appliance, many people are wondering what all this means for the GlusterFS project and gluster.org as a whole.

John Mark Walker conducted a webinar last week entitled ‘The Future of GlusterFS and Gluser.org’. In the beginning of this presentation John talks about the history behind, and origins of the Gluster project, he then goes into a basic overview of the features provided by GlusterFS, and finally he talks about what to expect from version 3.3 of GlusterFS and the GlusterFS open source community going forward.

Here are some of the talking points that were discussed during the webinar:

• Unstructured data is expected to grow 44X by 2020
• Scale out storage will hold 63,000 PB by 2015
• RedHat is aggressively hiring developers with file system knowledge
• Moving back to an open-source model from and open-core model
• Open source version will be testing ground for new features
• RHSSA will be more hardened and thoroughly tested
• Beta 3 for 3.3 due in Feb/Mar 2012
• GlusterFS 3.3 expected in Q2/Q3 of 2012

Here is the link to the entire presentation in a downloadable .mp4 format.

Here is a link to all the slides that were presented during the talk.