The first fruits of Red Hat's recent $31 million acquisition of Sistina Software, which RH acquired earlier this year, have emerged - in the form of something called the Red Hat Global File System (GFS).

RH has released the source code to GFS, a communal storage system that spans multiple devices on a network, through the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The solution allows files to be stored on a single file system shared by numerous servers. The information can reside on servers themselves or on a storage area network.

GFS is compatible to work with Oracle's 9i RAC database software that can spread across multiple clustered machines, and work with Red Hat's cluster software for ensuring services remain available despite machine problems.

Now that it's been GPL'd, the project to create an open source version of GFS - the OpenGFS project - becomes largely moot and is expected to merge its efforts with those of Red Hat.