Red Hat Storage Server 3

Red Hat, Inc. announced the availability of the Red Hat Storage Server, an open software-defined storage solution for scale-out file storage.

The capabilities are suited for data-intensive enterprise workloads including big data, operational analytics and enterprise file sharing and collaboration. With its 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 scale to support petabytes of data and offer granular control of the storage environment while lowering the overall cost of storage.

Highlights of 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 19PB per cluster.
• Improved data protection and operational control of storage clusters, including:
  • Volume snapshots for point-in-time copy of critical data, and
  • Monitoring of the storage cluster using open, industry standard frameworks, such as Nagios and SNMP.
• Integration with emerging big data analytics environments with support for a Hadoop File System Plug-In that enables running ApacheHadoop 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 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 add Red Hat Storage Server to existing pre-installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments.

Red Hat Storage Server 3 has an ecosystem support from its technology partners including Cisco and HP together with integration partners including International Integrated Solutions Ltd. 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. Customers and partners can utilize these solution architectures as blueprints to deploy 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. 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 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.

Ranga Rangachari, VP and GM, storage and big data, Red Hat, said: “Red Hat is committed to providing enterprise customers with a comprehensive open, software-defined storage portfolio spanning physical, virtual and cloud environments. With this latest release, Red Hat is leading the charge on open, software-defined storage to help build agile enterprises that can rapidly gain competitive advantage by leveraging the tangible value hidden inside unstructured data.”

Simon Robinson, research VP, storage, 451 Research, said: “The enterprise wants their IT stack to look – and behave – like a cloud, so the storage infrastructure must support this change. Within many enterprise IT departments, this is prompting a fundamental rethink of storage strategy. Red Hat’s software-defined storage portfolio offers an open source alternative to proprietary technology stacks to address mounting challenges around the growth of enterprise data.”

Satinder Sethi, VP, engineering, Cisco Technology, Inc.‘s data center solutions, said: “As an established leader in enterprise security solutions, and a rapidly growing leader in enterprise servers, Cisco is excited to team with Red Hat to offer an open source software-defined storage solution for Splunk Enterprise deployments. Cisco UCS servers pooled with Red Hat Storage Server software offer Splunk customers a low-cost, elastic storage solution, as described in our new reference architecture. Our joint customers can now increase the amount of machine-generated data they store for Splunk analysis, making security threat patterns easier to detect in a cost-effective way.”

John Gromala, senior director, hyperscale product management, Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP‘s servers, said: “Storage architectures and compute resources are rapidly evolving to accommodate the exponential explosion in data. As a result, turning vast pools of data into actionable insight becomes increasingly difficult and complex. Red Hat Storage Server with the HP ProLiant SL4540 server provides our joint customers with an integrated solution that is purpose-built for big data, removing a significant burden in managing and aggregating storage instances, eliminating bottlenecks and allowing performance to scale alongside capacity; in order to unlock timely insights from their data.”

John Kreisa, VP of strategic marketing, Hortonworks Inc., said: “As Hadoop becomes the cornerstone of the modern data architecture, more enterprises are demanding choice, flexibility and efficiency in their big storage platform. With the Red Hat Storage plug-in for the Hortonworks Data Platform, the industry’s only 100% open source Hadoop distribution, we are empowering joint customers with seamless access to more data for deeper analysis on a cost-effective scale-out storage solution, enabling the data-driven workloads that are shaping the future of business.”
 
Zdenek Sedlak, infrastructure architect, Ikano Bank AB, said: “To ensure the availability of services to our customers, Ikano Bank upgraded its internal data management process with a HA storage solution. With Red Hat Storage Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS, we were able to deploy a clustered, open software-defined storage solution. The performance of our servers greatly increased, while the customer data batch processing time decreased. Red Hat solutions are important to our organization because of the security of the solutions and lack of vendor lock-in.”
 
Marcus Rex, CEO and founder, ownCloud, Inc., said: “Red Hat Storage Server 3 combined with ownCloud Enterprise Edition is the a turn-key environment well-suited for businesses looking to build an on-premises cloud – lowering storage costs and streamlining information access with flexible deployment options. The combination, running on industry-standard HP servers, gives businesses an open yet secure and private way for their employees to collaborate with their peers, partners and customers, sync and access files no matter where they are, all while giving IT visibility and control.”

Takeru Moriki, executive MD, Saga IDC Co., Ltd., said: “Saga IDC Co., Ltd. welcomes the latest release of Red Hat Storage 3. We are using Red Hat Storage, distributed scale-out storage, as a service infrastructure. We are happy to deliver the rich and stable system environment to our customers with functional enhancements this time. We look forward to continuous collaboration with Red Hat to provide valuable services to our customers.”

David Yaffe, technical analyst, network and enterprise information systems, information systems, Saskatchewan Telecommunications Holding Corporation (SaskTel), said: “As a full service telecommunications provider in Canada, SaskTel provides highly available and secure telephony and data services. By standardizing on Red Hat Storage Server on commodity hardware, we were able to quickly scale our infrastructure to manage massive amounts of data while decreasing our costs. Because Red Hat Storage Server integrates into our Splunk environment, we considerably increased the quality of business insights by being able to store and analyze more machine data for a longer duration.”