 Okay, my next guest, Tom Trainor, Director of Product Marketing at Gluster. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Good to be in theCUBE. Okay, are you also a research analyst, too? I have been a research analyst in the past, yes, that's correct. I know Tom Trainor has written some great posts about cloud. Is that you? Oh, thank you. Yes, that is me. Yes, that's me. You're a legend. Yeah, a legend. We follow your work, obviously. So you're doubled. Are you still writing? I still blog occasionally. Yeah. You're still blogging? Yeah. Okay, and then you're at Gluster now since January? I am, yes, that's right. So talk about Gluster. So I know these guys were around clusters, around storage, so give us a quick two cent overview of what Gluster's doing. We've covered them on SiliconANGLE, but I want to hear from you what's going on over there. Well, so at Gluster today, well, a little short history. We started as an open source file system provider, and earlier this year we launched three new commercial products. And then eventually, over the last few months, we developed and launched a fourth new commercial product as well. So we packaged Gluster FS and deliver it in a commercial offering, or a number of commercial offerings today. So it's very exciting. We deploy on Amazon Web Services, we deploy through RightScale, VMware, KVM, and Zen, and then also directly on bare metal today as well. So you've been covering the cloud, obviously. We have been too. It's been a lot of cloud washing over the past year. I think you've called out a few companies doing it, as we have as well. But I mean, the reality is, it's very hyped up market. Simon Crosby was just on talking about open source and how important that is to the innovation cycle that we're living in now, which is rapid two year Mars law, incumbents are at risk. People are trying to do a little land grabbing on certain proprietary extensions of things, whether it's a version of Hadoop or MapReduce or something in open source. So open source is important, but you've got to have a business model. So what's going on with, and Zen obviously makes a lot of money on management, so you can deploy an open source business model. So take us through your thoughts on succeeding in the open source world. Well, so open source doesn't necessarily mean that you can't make money as a company. Open source typically has a model where users will download an open source product of some sort and then look to purchase support as they deploy it within a production environment or a mission critical environment. And that's a common business model, but also you'll find companies that have been widely adopted from an open source perspective, like Gluster, who has hundreds of thousands of deployments from the open source community. They also find methodologies for monetizing that open source product and bringing that into the commercial environment, the enterprise environment, and then offering and building in support right up front as opposed to doing the download and then tracking you and trying to work with you for support. The support's already built in and baked in in the product that's immediately downloadable. How do you guys handle security in open source? Simon talked about that. It's actually a better paradigm with open source because you don't rely on one vendor. You guys, how are you dealing with security? Obviously a hot button is in the cloud and all across up and down the stack. That's right. Security is a big hot button. In fact, I was at an event last night in Foster City, a cloud event where we talked about security and a number of other factors around cloud data transfer and interaction. And security is very hot, very topical. What we do is we build security into the file system. So instead of adding on and taking partners and layering in security solutions, we build security in right from the beginning and then we continually update and modify security as well so that those who deploy our products today can transfer files from private cloud to public cloud and not have to worry about security concerns. They should be worried about security concerns always, but they don't have to worry about the Gluster file system in a global namespace transferring files. So with all the big data hype, and big data is a real deal and we're hearing it across the board from developers, it's early stage, Hadoop is growing like crazy, obviously we're at the cloud area offices, Silicon Angles offices at the cloud area. We know those guys, MapReduce has been pioneering in its implementation. You guys are a file system. What is your company's statement on Hadoop? Obviously, do you require HDFS? Are you guys different? Do you play along? How do you talk to your customers who are all gangbusters for Hadoop? We love HDFS. We love Hadoop. We think the elephant is really cute and cool and in fact, our VP of marketing was previously at the sponsor for Hadoop. So we like Hadoop and the way we're looking at the future is why not make Hadoop better than it is today from a file system perspective? So it's certainly an area where we would say watch this space and what we do with making Hadoop much better than it is today. Do you guys work with HDFS? Do you work with HDFS? Well, the way we look at it is we like it, we like what it does, but we think we can actually provide better performance characteristics and lower latency and scalability and Hadoop's not necessarily built for a storage environment, so we are. We believe that over time, folks will look at GlusterFS as a potential replacement for Hadoop. Yeah, I think a lot of people look at Hadoop and Hadoop in particular, that it's a patchy based open source project, I mean, they're all about low cost commodity hardware. So I don't think they look at the storage subsystems as a strategic, in fact they might even look at down on storage because to them it's just not an issue. In the real world where their clients are moving, and then Cloudera and Hadoop software is not just media companies and web properties, they've got government, they've got financial, they have a lot of verticals like healthcare, so because these are verticals that have storage. Storage architectures. So what is your vision on that? How do you see those big deployed or existing incumbent infrastructures dealing with Hadoop in this new world? Well, I think it's an interesting question that you ask because a lot of these enterprise environments are used to the big spend, the big budget and the big spend on hardware. And when they look at opportunities like Hadoop or even GlusterFS, and they don't have to have that big spend, it becomes a big question mark, well why don't I have to spend a whole lot of money for solutions from company E or company I or company H, how do I actually leverage this commodity hardware? And does commodity hardware necessarily mean not reliable? And today the answer is no, 20 years ago the answer would be yes, not reliable, today commodity hardware is highly reliable. And you've got to coexist with the existing, I mean you've got to have the proof of concepts, you've got to support those and there has to be kind of an interoperability. That's very true. And you know we're fortunate at Gluster to have such a large customer base that deploys immensely large and scalable kinds of serving environments, media serving environments like Pandora and Envoy Media and Bright Cove who just consistently serve lots and lots of unstructured data, huge amounts of unstructured data and continually scale their storage farm without performance penalties and it's not capacity based, right? So pricing is not capacity based and they love it, right? So that kind of concept is new to a lot of the enterprise environments and environments that are in the big data space, they're used to spending a lot of money for expensive solutions when in fact today now with innovation you don't have to. Innovation is a key theme. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com. We're live at Citrix Synergy 2011 on the Solutions Pavilion opening night, people are drinking and eating a lot of beer and wine, sodas being drunk and food. This is the cube where we extract the knowledge from the smart nodes and share that with you and we're Tom Trainor from Gluster. They make a file clustering software for storage. I know you're busy, you got to get going but you guys have Pandora as a client. We do. Obviously they're going public. Did they go public? They've gone public. I know Tom over there, Tom Conrad, CTO. Great service. They're dealing with a lot of storage, right? They are dealing with an immense amount of storage on a daily basis. Lots of storage management, lots of file management. The current Lady Gaga album that's out is certainly a popular item for them. And so what they need is an environment, a storage environment that not only stores information quickly, but stores multiple versions of files quickly. They have a long tail problem, right? So they need to be able to access those files rapidly and not wait for indexing and search time to actually go and find a file and serve it out to their cash servers. And your CEO, Ben Gallup, ex-Verisign, worked at Plaxo, one of the early guys at Plaxo. He knows all about security, knows all about data, knows a lot about the industry. You guys are dealing with that. What is the number one concern for these companies like Pandora out there? I mean, obviously they have to run at scale, scale out and have production level volumes. Yeah. Well, you mentioned Ben and we just celebrated a one-year anniversary of Ben being with Gluster. So it's a milestone for Ben, a milestone for the company, and we're very happy he's here with us. Essentially what customers are looking at is how do I leverage scale out? What does it really mean? And when I scale out, do I have to pay by capacity or by performance or how do I do that? And we help answer those questions. And then also part of what we do is also answer the question of how do I leverage the private cloud or the data center or the on-premise environment with the public cloud? How do I actually build in these two environments and leverage data transfer or information transfer between the two? And prior to Gluster, the methodology was to rewrite applications, use object storage in the cloud, or use some kind of a gateway product. So the real, this final question for you, I'm with Tom Train with Gluster is also a prolific blogger. Question is, will you continue to blog? I will continue to blog. Will you have your edge? Well, pardon? The same edge that you normally have? I'll always have the edge that I know. You know, you can get fired for being edgy, being a blogger, and I'll, no. Well, I've never been fired, so that's a good thing. But follow Tom Trainor, great guy. Thanks for coming on Inside the Cube, sharing your opinion. Thanks for having me. We're here on the ground at Citrix Synergy on the floor. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. Thanks for coming Inside the Cube.