Gluster Aquired by RedHat for $136M

In the latter part of 2008, we had a server that started to have problems. That’s when we discovered that DRBD would fail miserably if you tried switching the active state back and forth rapidly. This caused a split-brain situation and we had our entire company down for half a day while I got critical systems back up, and I spent more than a month tracking down everything that was botched.

I had to find a new solution.

By March of 2009, I had found and learned how to use GlusterFS. This was no easy task, as it turned out. The documentation was hit and miss. Settings may or may not be for the current version. Terms were used incongruously. Though they had a mailing list, questions to that list went unanswered. The IRC channel was silent.

Eventually, I figured it out on my own and decided to take my newfound knowledge and edit the wiki, and help people in the IRC channel. Now, if you’ve ever tried to get support from an IRC channel, most of the time you get surly narcissists who feel that demeaning people is somehow helpful. I vowed that our channel would be different. My narcissism would not be surly.

I have no idea over the past two and a half years how many people I helped, but I do know that my example and influence have created one of the nicest and most helpful IRC support channels I’ve ever encountered. This in large part is thanks to the wonderful people that have joined me on #gluster: Samuli ‘samppah’ Heinonen, Louis ‘semiosis’ Zuckerman, Jeff ‘jdarcy’ Darcy, Adam ‘m0zes’ Tygart, Todd ‘Heebie’ Hebert and others.

Today, RedHat and Gluster announced the acquisition. Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy, Gluster CTO stated in the webcast, “The community was central to our success.” Brian Stevens, CTO and VP, Worldwide Engineering, Red Hat also acknowledged the community was a part of RedHat’s decision in his announcement.

I’ve been assured that the check is in the mail for my part in this acquisition, but that the envelope and postage have more value than the check.

All kidding aside, my sincere congratulations to everybody, employee, community and end-user that’s made Gluster such a success. And congratulations to RedHat on filling this gap in their enterprise offerings.

~ by edwyseguru on October 4, 2011.