Scale out sister: Open sorcerer pulls v3 Gluster cluster out of Red Hat

Open sorcery evangelist Red Hat has updated its Gluster clustering Red Hat Storage Server to v3, adding capacity and cluster nodes.

RHSS v 3.0 is based on the GlusterFS 3.6 file system with RHEL 6.0. It is designed for scale-out file storage and is built from, of course, open source software.

A datasheet (PDF) says: “Red Hat Storage Server can easily be deployed on-premise, in public cloud infrastructures, and in hybrid cloud environments. It is optimised for storage-intensive enterprise workloads such as archiving and backup, rich media content delivery, enterprise drop-box, cloud and business applications, virtual and cloud infrastructure storage, as well as emerging workloads such as co-resident applications and big data Hadoop workloads."

RHSS v3 features include:

• support for up to 60 drives per server, up from 36,
• support for 128 servers per cluster, up from 64, providing a usable capacity of up to 19 petabytes per cluster,
• volume snapshots for point-in-time copy of critical data,
• storage cluster monitoring using frameworks such as Nagios and SNMP,
• support for a Hadoop File System Plug-In to run Apache Hadoop workloads
• integration with Apache Ambari for management and monitoring of Hadoop and underlying storage,
• support for SSDs for low latency workloads,
• expanded hardware compatibility list (HCL) for greater choice and
• faster deployment with RPM-based distribution option for existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) users.

So here is Red Hat’s equivalent, roughly speaking, to DDN’s GS7K, GPFS-using scale-out filer appliance. This can hold hundreds of petabytes of data, far more than RHSS, which is targeted at the great mass of smaller deployments.

Although RHSS is not an appliance, Red Hat says its deployment can be helped by integration partners like International Integrated Solutions Ltd and Function1. Also, it 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.”

RHSS complements Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise v1.2 offering for distributed block and object stores.

Check out Red Hat's Gluster background here. Check out a Red Hat webcast about v3 RHSS here (filling in detailed registration form required), which involves watching a 43-minute video.

Get faster, no-registration-needed, access to RHSS v3.0 details from a downloadable datasheet (PDF). ®