Gluster Storage Software Appliance

Gluster announced the availability of the Gluster Storage Software Appliance, extending the range of commercially supported configurations for Gluster in the private cloud and on-premise data center environments.

This new product combines Red Hat CentOS and GlusterFS and can be deployed on any Red Hat Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) certified host server and its certified storage.
 
In both public and private clouds, Gluster provides enterprises with the ability to combine commodity compute and storage into a virtualized, standardized, and centrally managed storage pool that can flexibly scale to petabytes of capacity, GB/s of throughput, and N-way availability.

Prior to the release of the Storage Software Appliance, Gluster was available for deployment in:

• public clouds, as an Amazon Machine Image or RightScale Server Template;
• in private clouds, as a virtual storage appliance on top of hypervisors such as VMware, KVM, or Xen; or
• as a non-commercially supported implementation of the open source GlusterFS.

As of today, a fourth deployment option is available. Customers running private clouds or on-premise data centers can now obtain commercial support for Gluster deployed as a software appliance in a non-virtualized, bare metal environment.
 
Private cloud environments Gluster offers up to three times the performance at one-third the cost of proprietary and monolithic scale-up storage solutions. Like all Gluster solutions, the Gluster Storage Software Appliance is POSIX-compliant and does not require applications to be rewritten. Users of the Storage Software Appliance can aggregate CPU, memory, and capacity into a single global namespace, scale out capacity and performance linearly on-demand, and benefit from improved storage economics via the use of commodity hardware.
 
"The increased use of cloud computing technologies in the private cloud and on-premise data centers has established a need in terms of cloud storage solutions specific to these environments," said George Crump, president and founder of Storage-Switzerland. "The Gluster Storage Software Appliance is an excellent example of a solution designed for cloud environments that require high availability, performance and value. The choice to do all of this on Red Hat certified hardware makes the value and usability of the solution even more compelling."

The Gluster Storage Software Appliance incorporates the latest version of GlusterFS (version 3.2), which includes:

• Geo-Replication – providing continuous, asynchronous and incremental replication service from one site to another over local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs) and across the Internet. Only incremental changes are replicated while operating at the block level with no requirement for snapshot-like copies of whole files or volumes. In addition, v3.2 features intelligent asynchronous replication in which GlusterFS tracks changes to the primary data and replicates in real time across a WAN. Changes are tracked and queued to ensure data stays synchronized regardless of latency or potential network interruptions.
• Accessible usage quotas – with the ability to set quota on usage of disk space by directories or volumes. Storage administrators can control disk space utilization at the directory and/or volume levels with Gluster by setting limits to allocate disk space at any level in the volume and directory hierarchy. This is particularly useful in cloud deployments to facilitate the utility billing model.
• Monitoring and management tools (Gluster Top and Profile) – that provide familiar monitoring and statistics capabilities for I/O operations and performance statistics. Gluster Top presents the top 100 operations per server, providing visibility into the I/O workload pattern. Gluster Profile provides performance statistics over a user-defined time period for metrics including latency, number and type of calls, and amount of data read or written.

"The industry is becoming increasingly savvy to the fact that storage technology can make or break a public or private cloud deployment," said Ben Golub, president and CEO at Gluster. "Our new Storage Software Appliance delivers highly available, scale-out, on-demand storage technology that can integrate seamlessly with Red Hat technology in any private cloud or on-premise storage environment."
 
The Gluster Storage Software Appliance will be available on May 16, and it can run on any hardware on the Red Hat Hardware Compatibility List.