Red Hat Storage at HP Customer Center

Red Hat, Inc. announced the availability of the open software-defined storage experience at the HP Customer Center located in Grenoble, France.

Enterprise IT customers managing big, unstructured data workloads can now gain first-hand knowledge of open software-defined storage on storage servers through a hands-on experience of the combined Red Hat Storage and HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 solution. In addition, Red Hat and HP launched a solution portal for online demonstrations of the joint solution and various workloads.

Software-defined storage comes in second in the top ten trends you need to watch according to Gartner’s December 2013 webinar, Top Ten Trends and Their Impact on IT Infrastructure and Operations. In addition, the same Gartner webinar cites: “In the next 5 years the average enterprise will see data capacities grow more than 800%.” This near-term data explosion calls for IT managers to consider the value of an integrated software-defined storage and compute solution that can scale in a flexible and cost-effective way.

The ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 servers provide up to three ProLiant compatible servers integrated with up to 60 storage drives for a flexible storage server configuration. Designed for big data environments, the ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 server reduces cost and power consumption through breakthrough storage density and flexible server configurations delivered within a 4.3U package, providing 240TB of storage per standard rack.

Red Hat Storage connects the individual storage servers into a unified cluster of scale-out storage for unstructured data. Built on the trusted Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS and the proven GlusterFS distributed file system, Red Hat Storage provides a reliable, open-source storage solution for unstructured data by scaling to petabytes while offering common data management services such as pooling, partitioning, mirroring, and load balancing across a cluster of storage servers, coupled with multi-site data replication.

Brent Compton, director, ecosystem, storage and big data, Red Hat, said: “Multiple HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 servers clustered through Red Hat Storage offer a compelling alternative to more expensive, proprietary scale-out storage appliances. Open software-defined storage is all about breaking down high-cost closed storage systems into lower cost, higher-value software and hardware elements. We are pleased to help our customers explore the powerful benefits of open software-defined storage running on standard servers at the HP Customer Center in Grenoble.“

John Gromala, senior director of product management, HP servers, said: “The accelerated growth of data volumes driven by mobile, cloud and big data is creating major challenges for customers. HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 servers, integrated with leading software storage solutions such as Red Hat Storage, will enable our customers to evaluate this innovative solution and give them the tools to deploy to address their data challenges.“