Red Hat breaks traditional storage barriers

Red Hat, Inc. has announced the availability of the newest major release of Red Hat Storage Server, an industry leading open software-defined storage solution for scale-out file storage. The advanced capabilities in Red Hat Storage 3 are well-suited for data-intensive enterprise workloads including big data, operational analytics and enterprise file sharing and collaboration. With its proven and validated workload solutions, Red Hat Storage Server 3 enables enterprises to curate enterprise data to increase responsiveness, control costs and improve operational efficiency.

Red Hat is committed to building agile storage solutions through community-driven innovation to drive agility within the enterprise so as to better respond to competitive threats and changes in the evolving IT landscape. Based on open source GlusterFS 3.6 file system and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Storage Server 3 is designed to easily scale to support petabytes of data and offer granular control of your storage environment while lowering the overall cost of storage.

Highlights of the new capabilities of Red Hat Storage Server 3 include:
· Increased scale and capacity by more than three times with support for up to 60 drives per server, up from 36, and 128 servers per cluster, up from 64, providing a usable capacity of up to 19 petabytes per cluster.
· Improved data protection and operational control of storage clusters, including:
o volume snapshots for point-in-time copy of critical data, and
o comprehensive monitoring of the storage cluster using open, industry standard frameworks, such as Nagios and SNMP.
· Easy integration with emerging big data analytics environments with support for a Hadoop File System Plug-In that enables running ApacheTM Hadoop® workloads on the storage server, as well as tight integration with Apache Ambari for management and monitoring of Hadoop and underlying storage.
· More hardware choice and flexibility, including support for SSD for low latency workloads, and a significantly expanded hardware compatibility list (HCL) for greater choice in hardware platforms.
· Rapid deployment with RPM-based distribution option offering maximum deployment flexibility to existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux users. Customers can now easily add Red Hat Storage Server to existing pre-installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments.

Red Hat Storage Server 3 has significant ecosystem support from its industry-leading technology partners including Cisco and HP together with integration partners including International Integrated Solutions Ltd., and Function1 to ease enterprise deployment. In addition, Red Hat has collaborated with leading enterprise software vendors Splunk®, Hortonworks® and ownCloud to enable solution architectures for log and cyber security analytics, Apache Hadoop, and enterprise file sharing and collaboration, respectively. Our customers and partners can utilize these proven solution architectures as blueprints to deploy best of breed solutions to address specific customer workload environments.

Red Hat Storage Server 3 complements the July 2014 delivery of Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise version 1.2. In May 2014, Red Hat acquired Inktank, provider of Ceph and Inktank Ceph Enterprise open source storage solutions. Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise delivers object and block storage software to enterprises deploying public or private clouds, including many early adopters of OpenStack. The addition of Red Hat’s Ceph Enterprise to Red Hat’s storage product portfolio gives customers a comprehensive offering of open software-defined storage solutions across object, block and file system storage.