July 1, 2004

By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Principal Research Analyst, Nemertes Research, Andreas@nemertes.com

Less than six months after Redhat (NASDAQ: RHAT) acquired Sistina, a storage infrastructure company, it has made good on its promise to release the Global File System (GFS) software suite and its associated management tools under an open source license. GFS is an enterprise-class clustering file system that allows a cluster of Linux servers to share SAN storage across several nodes while retaining data consistency, rapid access, and fault tolerance. Most importantly, GFS is optimized for Oracle’s 9i RAC clustering solution, enabling Oracle RAC to run without local storage on a shared Oracle "home" directory and makes it a lot easier to add or resize storage on-the-fly, or add Oracle servers to meet a sudden spike in demand. The move illustrates a growing trend towards enterprise-class open-source solutions geared towards the data center.

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