As the saying goes, few things in life are certain except death and taxes. To that, we should add another certainty: that the amount of data that you need to store and manage will continue to grow at a rapid pace. One way to deal with this profusion of data is with clustered storage, like Gluster.

Gluster is an open source storage platform for working with large amounts of data (terabytes all the way up to petabytes) that ties together everything from the operating system layer to filesystem and management interface. To get a deeper view on Gluster, we asked Anand Babu Periasamy, CTO and co-founder of Gluster, to describe the technology and give a glimpse into the project's roadmap.

Of course, you know regular computer system backups are important and it's always a good idea to store your most critical data offsite for added security. If you're a Linux user, finding a service that's compatible with your operating system isn't easy, but they do exist. Here are five online backup and storage services for personal or business use that work great with Linux.

JungleDisk - This powerful paid service provides support for both Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files storage. It completely encrypts all data and will automatically restart all background operations following a system crash or shutdown. JungleDisk archives old and deleted files for later retrieval, and relies on multiple data centers to keep your files safe. The Desktop Edition for Linux requires Linux x86, works with KDE or GNOME desktops, and includes a command-line only version for power users.

Here at OStatic, we concentrate on open source applications, operating systems, issues, and the business of open source, but freeware and truly useful free services are always on my radar even if they're not from the open source world. One example of a free service that will probably appeal to open sourcers as well as non-open sourcers is ADrive, which will give anyone 50GB of free online storage--far more than existing providers of free online storage, such as XDrive--are doling out. One reason I thought I'd post this is that a colleague of mine--a well-known web designer--pinged me to ask where he could get the most free online storage, and he was sure that the holy grail was XDrive.