Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 …

Red Hat, Inc. announced the availability of Storage Server 2.0, the company’s scale-out, open source storage software solution for the management of unstructured data.

It transforms the enterprise and cloud storage market by combining community-powered innovation with the volume economics of industry standard x86 servers across cloud or hybrid environments.

Across industries, the volume of unstructured data – ranging from social media content, text and emails to image, video and audio files – is exploding as a result of digitization, mobility and our increasingly connected world, and dramatically outpacing the growth of structured data. By 2020, the growth of Internet-connected devices and sensors is projected to reach 50 billion, a prediction that supports IDC’s estimate that the total volume of the digital universe – comprised of 90% unstructured data and calculated at 1.8 zettabytes in 2011 – will increase by a factor of 50 in 2020.

As the volume of unstructured data continues to grow, organizations are facing challenges managing both compute and data, and closed source, proprietary and monolithic hardware storage solutions may not be equipped to help organizations deal with this onslaught in a cost-effective or scalable manner.

Red Hat Storage solutions leverage community-powered innovation to address scale-out storage challenges. Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 is a file storage solution to integrate with object storage, enabling users to combine larger amounts of storage into a single centralized pool.

Unified file and object storage simplifies the management of different kinds of data, giving customers storage and information flexibility, the ability to scale to meet unstructured data storage demands and enhancing information access options in a more cost-effective manner.

Built on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, it provides a choice by allowing customers to deploy cost-effective, scalable and HA storage without compromising on scale or performance. Storage Server can be deployed in private clouds, in public cloud infrastructures or hybrid cloud environments and is optimized for storage-intensive enterprise workloads including HPC, near-line archival and rich media content clouds.

Storage Server 2.0 also features the following innovations:

• Expanded choice, offering compatibility with more than 50 dual-socket x86-based servers from industry leaders
• Open and standards-based, it features support for file access protocols including CIFS, NFS, HTTP and OpenStack Swift; and
• Control without compromising data accessibility and availability, including geo-replication, equipping Red Hat Storage to handle the demanding production workloads.

Available only in Technology Preview, Storage Server 2.0 is also offering support for big data infrastructure, with compatibility for Apache Hadoop that provides a new storage option for Hadoop deployments.

With the ability to install Red Hat Storage in Hadoop environments, either in combination and along with Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), or as a replacement for HDFS, this Storage Server 2.0 technology preview enables faster file access and opens up data within Hadoop deployments to other file-based or object-based applications. Also available in Technology Preview is a management console for Red Hat Storage. Based on the oVirt Project – the open source infrastructure and virtualization management platform – the Storage Server 2.0 management console technology preview gives users visibility and control into their storage clusters via a single pane of glass.

Storage Server 2.0 is available, and launches with an ecosystem, giving users access to a selection of storage services.

Ranga Rangachari, VP and GM, Storage, Red Hat, said: "After several months of successful beta testing at leading companies around the world, coupled with the progress we’ve made since we entered the scale-out storage market last fall when Red Hat acquired Gluster, we’re excited to remove the beta label and offer Red Hat Storage Server to the market. In the coming years, open source storage solutions and volume x86 servers are expected to transform the storage market in the same way that Linux and volume x86 servers transformed the server market, and with Red Hat Storage we’re positioning ourselves to be at the very forefront of this industry transformation."

James VanEe, IT director, Institute for Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies, Cornell University, said: "The Cornell Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) uses Red Hat Storage to support our Institute of Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies, which needed a storage platform robust enough to handle data produced by Genomics, Proteomics and Imaging technologies. With Red Hat Storage, we have gained a highly scalable and reliable storage solution that has allowed us to adapt to our growing IT needs while remaining cost-effective."

Hideto Kamio, manager, Information Systems Div., System Infrastructure Management Dept., IT Platform Dept. at SOFTBANK TELECOM Corp., said: "With a variety of choices for large distributed file systems on commoditized x86 servers, we value Red Hat Storage highly because it reduces the complexity of our infrastructure by delivering availability, stability and ease of implementation and operation. There is a need for scalable storage infrastructures for use in public clouds, on-premise and hybrid clouds. We strongly believe Red Hat Storage will be an excellent fit for enterprise-class use cases, similar to other Red Hat products."

Terri McClure, senior storage analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "Red Hat is helping to pave the way for a fundamental change in the way storage is sold and consumed. With software-based, scale-out unified file and object storage, deployable on-premise or in the public cloud, supporting unstructured and semi-structured big data, Red Hat customers are now able to standardize on a scalable storage infrastructure that supports a broad range of application and user information accessibly requirements."

Stan Zaffos, VP and research director, Storage, Gartner, said: "Users desperate to contain storage costs while satisfying an ever-expanding need for big data and archive storage are ready to embrace solutions that deliver commodity economics without sacrificing availability or performance. Scale-out storage built using professionally supported open source storage software running on x86 servers configured with direct attached storage components offer both low cost and high product attractiveness."