Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform got a storage boost in release 3.4, which came out today. Developers can now use Red Hat's Gluster storage in a more dynamic fashion.

Gluster is the commercial version of GlusterFS, an open source file system for storage.

One shortfall in container storage was that storage volumes had to be provisioned ahead of time; more storage couldn't be added on the fly, even if capacity was available. To change that, Red Hat made some enhancements to Gluster and to Kubernetes. Those changes were enacted in Kubernetes 1.4 and, now, in OpenShift 3.4.

Gluster comes from the startup of the same name, which Red Hat acquired in 2011 for $136 million. Red Hat stuffed Gluster (the software, not the people) into containers last year, announcing the containerized versions in March and added them to OpenShift, the company's platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for Docker containers, in June.

That move was significant because it created an option for supporting stateful applications. Those applications, which include most of today's enterprise applications, require persistent storage in order to keep track of state — that is, you need a place to stash the information about what's happening to (and around) the application at a given point in time.

Stateful containers were a market ClusterHQ was trying to pursue, but as the rest of the industry took notice, competition became overwhelming. ClusterHQ chose to shut down late last month.