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+Introducing Gluster File System
+===============================
+
+GlusterFS is an open source, distributed file system capable of scaling to
+several petabytes and handling thousands of clients. It is a file system with
+a modular, stackable design, and a unique no-metadata server architecture.
+This no-metadata server architecture ensures better performance,
+linear scalability, and reliability. GlusterFS can be
+flexibly combined with commodity physical, virtual, and cloud resources
+to deliver highly available and performant enterprise storage at a
+fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.
+
+GlusterFS clusters together storage building blocks over Infiniband RDMA
+and/or TCP/IP interconnect, aggregating disk and memory resources and
+managing data in a single global namespace.
+
+GlusterFS aggregates various storage servers over network interconnects
+into one large parallel network file system. Based on a stackable user space
+design, it delivers exceptional performance for diverse workloads and is a key
+building block of GlusterFS.
+The POSIX compatible GlusterFS servers, use any ondisk file system which supports
+extended attributes (eg: ext4, XFS, etc) to format to store data on disks, can be
+accessed using industry-standard access protocols including Network File System (NFS)
+and Server Message Block (SMB).
+
+![ Virtualized Cloud Environments ](../images/640px-GlusterFS_Architecture.png)
+
+GlusterFS is designed for today's high-performance, virtualized cloud
+environments. Unlike traditional data centers, cloud environments
+require multi-tenancy along with the ability to grow or shrink resources
+on demand. Enterprises can scale capacity, performance, and availability
+on demand, with no vendor lock-in, across on-premise, public cloud, and
+hybrid environments.
+
+GlusterFS is in production at thousands of enterprises spanning media,
+healthcare, government, education, web 2.0, and financial services.
+
+## Commercial offerings and support ##
+
+Several companies offer support or consulting - http://www.gluster.org/consultants/.
+
+Red Hat Storage (http://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/storage/storage-server)
+is a commercial storage software product, based on GlusterFS.
+
+
+## About On-premise Installation ##
+
+GlusterFS for On-Premise allows physical storage to be utilized as a
+virtualized, scalable, and centrally managed pool of storage.
+
+GlusterFS can be installed on commodity servers resulting in a
+powerful, massively scalable, and highly available NAS environment.
+
+GlusterFS On-premise enables enterprises to treat physical storage as a
+virtualized, scalable, and centrally managed storage pool by using commodity
+storage hardware. It supports multi-tenancy by partitioning users or groups into
+logical volumes on shared storage. It enables users to eliminate, decrease, or
+manage their dependence on high-cost, monolithic and difficult-to-deploy storage arrays.
+You can add capacity in a matter of minutes across a wide variety of workloads without
+affecting performance. Storage can also be centrally managed across a variety of
+workloads, thus increasing storage efficiency.
+
+