Red Hat introduces OpenStack Shared File System Service

Red Hat has announced a technology preview of Red Hat Gluster Storage with capabilities from the OpenStack community’s new Manila project. Expanding the options for hybrid cloud storage, Red Hat Gluster Storage now provides enterprises with a scale-out shared file system service for OpenStack cloud infrastructures.

Red Hat is the initial software-defined storage member of the the OpenStack Manila project, a community-driven innovation that provisions and manages distributed file systems for OpenStack clouds. OpenStack Manila’s framework provides a vendor-neutral management API for provisioning and attaching different shared file systems. Working in a multi-tenant cloud environment, OpenStack Manila operates alongside the existing OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) and OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) services.

Red Hat led the development of OpenStack Manila’s IFS-Ganesha component which abstracts Manila file shares from underlying hardware and allows them to grow, shrink or migrate across physical resources. With Red Hat Gluster Storage and IFS-Ganesha, storage servers can be added or removed from the system dynamically and the data remains online while the system re-balances across the available hardware. The technology preview of Red Hat Gluster Storage with Manila provides the flexibility of open, software-defined storage for delivering the file share elasticity required for enterprise public cloud deployments.

Customers can test the functionality of OpenStack Manila today by downloading it from the OpenStack RDO community-supported distribution with the RDO Packstack Installer. The Red Hat Gluster Storage with Manila technology preview is planned for inclusion in the forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 release.