Red Hat Introducing OpenStack Shared File System Service

Red Hat, Inc. announced a technology preview of Gluster Storage with capabilities from the OpenStack community.

Expanding the options for hybrid cloud storage, Gluster Storage provides enterprises with a scale-out shared file system service for OpenStack cloud infrastructures.

Red Hat was the initial software-defined storage member of the OpenStack Manila project, a community-driven innovation that provisions and manages distributed file systems for OpenStack clouds. 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 services.

Red Hat led the development of 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 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 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. Gluster Storage with Manila technology preview is planned for inclusion in the forthcoming RH Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 release.

Ranga Rangachari, VP and GM, storage and big data, Red Hat, said: “The Red Hat storage portfolio plays an important role in many enterprise OpenStack cloud deployments. As a leader in the Manila community project, we recognized early on the value of an open, software-defined storage shared file system service for OpenStack. IT professionals acknowledge open, software-defined storage as a good fit for cloud, and many rely on Red Hat as a trusted partner to assist them on their cloud journey. The technology preview of Red Hat Gluster Storage with Manila can move customers another step forward in realizing their next-generation enterprise datacenter plans.“