Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services

Red Hat, Inc. announced the availability of the Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that is built on the former Gluster technology that the company acquired in October 2011.

It enables organizations to extend their datacenter storage to the cloud. With the appliance, users have the ability to aggregate both Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, creating a highly available virtualized storage pool that offers scalability and performance in the cloud. This news comes on the heels of Red Hat’s announcement of its Storage Software Appliance in December 2011. These two products provide flexibility to organizations looking to include file storage in their cloud strategies.

Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS features both synchronous and asynchronous file replication, assuring data availability across AWS Availability Zones. Synchronous replication provides users with redundancy and protection within a single datacenter or multiple datacenters and availability zones in a region, while asynchronous geo-replication offers data availability across all AWS Regions. Virtual Storage Appliance is POSIX compliant meaning that no application modifications are required for data access in the cloud.

"Organizations are increasingly looking for cloud storage that delivers the flexibility and cost savings of the cloud without having to overhaul their entire application and storage infrastructure," said Terri McClure, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "This newest offering by Red Hat enables organizations to seamlessly easily extend their datacenter storage to the cloud while still receiving the performance and availability desired."

Benefits of Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS include:

• Deploy in minutes – Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS can be deployed in minutes, providing a fast way to create an on-demand, performance, petabyte-scale storage environment;
• Improved Amazon EC2 experience – each appliance pools multiple EBS storage elements together, moving beyond capacity limitations of a single device and smoothing performance variations across the pool. Amazon EC2 customers experience greater availability, performance and utility pricing;
• No application rewrites – because Virtual Storage Appliance is POSIX-compliant, there is no need to rewrite applications when moving data to the cloud as with cloud-based object storage; and,
• Extend data center – Using the Virtual Appliance along with the Storage Software Appliance enables to extend the unstructured data storage in your datacenter to the cloud. You can use storage as a large pool or resource and replicate to and from the cloud to meet your growing storage needs and to handle overflow situations.

"This release of Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services provides users with the highly available storage solutions necessary for a successful cloud deployment," said Ranga Rangachari, general manager, Storage at Red Hat. "By using the appliance within the AWS environment, users are now able to scale linearly for performance and capacity, connect multiple AWS instances to a single shared storage pool, and also experience the benefits of an AWS deployment. In the near future, we expect the appliance to also support additional cloud providers and extend its benefits to their deployments."