DescriptionWith the rapid rise of online resources such as those o ered by Google, Dropbox and Mi- crosoft cloud computing is playing a bigger part in everyday lives than most people can imagine. More and more services are being o ered online even in academia and science terabytes of data is collected during experiments and this data has to be stored and pro- visioned across various geographical locations. This is achieved through distributed le systems and software de ned networks is a new paradigm that provides interesting ways to improve these Distributed File systems. In order to understand the potential impact of SDN usage on distributed le systems this work has set out to characterize GlusterFS in certain con gurations by emulating a realistic distributed load on the le system. Software De ned Networks as opposed to traditional networks are not static, in the sense that the system can manage data bandwidth and balance data loads according to requirements and cost. This work measures the performance in units of throughput in KB per second along with graphs of network activity from empirical executions to understand GlusterFS in more detail. Experimental results of introducing SDN into GlusterFS yeilded very good results. Signi - cant gains in the range of 45% - 60% in the quality of service were observed during manual manipulation of the network.