Open source software company Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) said that seven charter members have signed letters of intent to join the Gluster Community, a community for open software-defined storage.

The seven charter board members include DataLab, Hortonworks, Intel, The Linux Foundation, NTTPC, Open Source Lab at Oregon State University, and Red Hat.

The Gluster Community Board will govern the community and provide guidance for the community at large. It consists of representatives from each of the charter member organizations and individual community contributors. The board will decide which projects reach the milestones required for inclusion in the official Gluster Software Distribution and identify areas of innovation to address open technology advancements of open software-defined storage.

The Board will also manage the Gluster Community’s expansion into a multi-project open source community and software distribution through the recently-available Gluster Community Forge, a collaborative development web site where developers and organizations can develop and collaborate on new open software-defined storage projects.