GlusterFS developer here. The OP is extremely misleading, so I'll try to set the record straight.

(1) Granted, snapshots (volume or file level) aren't implemented yet. OTOH, there are two projects for file-level snapshots that are far enough along to have patches in either the main review queue or the community forge. Volume-level snapshots are a little further behind. Unsurprisingly, snapshots in a distributed filesystem are hard, and we're determined to get them right before we foist some half-baked result on users and risk losing their data.

(2) The author seems very confused about the relationship between bricks (storage units) and servers used for mounting. The mount server is used once to fetch a configuration, then the client connects directly to the bricks. There is no need to specify all of the bricks on the mount command; one need only specify enough servers - two or three - to handle one being down at mount time. RRDNS can also help here.

(3) Lack of support for login/password authentication. This has not been true in the I/O path since forever; it only affects the CLI, which should only be run from the servers themselves (or similarly secure hosts) anyway. It should not be run from arbitrary hosts. Adding full SSL-based auth is already an accepted feature for GlusterFS 3.5 and some of the patches are already in progress. Other management interfaces already have stronger auth.

(4) Volumes can be mounted R/W from many locations. This is actually a strength, since volumes are files. Unlike some alternatives, GlusterFS provides true multi-protocol access - not just different silos for different interfaces within the same infrastructure but the same data accessible via (deep breath) native protocol, NFS, SMB, Swift, Cinder, Hadoop FileSystem API, or raw C API. It's up to the cloud infrastructure (e.g. Nova) not to mount the same block-storage device from multiple locations, just as with every alternative.

(5) What's even more damning than what the author says is what the author doesn't say. There are benefits to having full POSIX semantics so that hundreds of thousands of programs and scripts that don't speak other storage APIs can use the data. There are benefits to having the same data available through many protocols. There are benefits to having data that's shared at a granularity finer than whole-object GET and PUT, with familiar permissions and ACLs. There are benefits to having a system where any new feature - e.g. georeplication, erasure coding, deduplication - immediately becomes available across all access protocols. Every performance comparison I've seen vs. obvious alternatives has either favored GlusterFS or revealed cheating (e.g. buffering locally or throwing away O_SYNC) by the competitor. Or both. Of course, the OP has already made up his mind so he doesn't mention any of this.

It's perfectly fine that the author prefers something else. He mentions Ceph. I love Ceph. I also love XtreemFS, which hardly anybody seems to know about and that's a shame. We're all on the same side, promoting open-source horizontally scalable filesystems vs. worse alternatives - proprietary storage, non-scalable storage, storage that can't be mounted and used in familiar ways by normal users. When we've won that battle we can fight over the spoils. ;) The point is that even for a Cinder use case the author's preferences might not apply to anyone else, and they certainly don't apply to many of the more general use cases that all of these systems are designed to support.