A few months into the gluster acquisition by Red Hat ...
By joe
- 2 minutes read - 406 words… just received a note indicating that our Gluster Reseller contract was voided, and that we would be seeing a new partner portal for Red Hat Storage coming soon where we could apply again for reseller status. Hmmm …. Reading over the information I saw on the Red Hat storage platform, it looks like they are going full on appliance route, which diminishes the value we can potentially add to the platform, and removes much of the differentiation we can do at the stack level (better kernels, up to date drivers, tweaked/tuned drivers/OS, …). Actually, their focus looks like it was laid out in pretty good detail … they are looking to make these effectively “sealed” type appliances. I think the rationale for this is competition from Oracle, and to some degree it makes sense. But it also changes what we can and cannot do with Gluster. I have a sense that the 3.2.5 release may be one of the last public code drops … this is a hunch, I have no real information one way or another. I suspect that work on *BSD and Solaris will be wound down (at least in the context of integrating patches for this). I don’t think we will see gluster as a separate product or tarball or … going forward. I hope I am wrong, but to a degree, this makes sense as a strategy. Acquire a company, and monetize the product, by removing many of the other channels that it could be used with. Unfortunately for us, we got caught up in the newly non-sanctioned use cases. Its being packaged more for a Dell, or another large white box provider to throw storage together. So 3.2.5 might be the last really publicly available system. Yeah, it is open source, and I am sure you can get it. But its going to be tightly tied to the Red Hat platform. Which isn’t a bad thing, but as a company that works hard at differentiating by replacing and tuning underperforming portions of the stack, mebbe this isn’t as good for us. Gonna have to think about this somewhat. Some customers have been nervous about this going forward, and I’ve done all I can to get them to wait and see before acting. These changes I don’t see making them less nervous … actually more. Again, hoping I am wrong. But I have a pretty good history of not being wrong.