What’s Doing Red Hat in Storage?

Red Hat, Inc., historically in enterprise Linux since its inception in 1993, has decided to enter seriously into storage with the acquisition of start-up Gluster, Inc. for $136 million in cash in October 2011.

Note also that Red Hat bought storage specialist Sistina Software for about $31 million in stock in 2003, a company in file system under Linux for virtualization and data sharing through a SAN.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, with R&D team in India, start-up Gluster was born in 2005 as a spin-off from California Digital Corp., beginning with $20,000 in angel investments and getting $8.5 million in series B round of founding in 2010, total raised being $12.5 million. Investors were Indian’s Nexus Venture Partners and Europe’s Index Ventures. At the time of the acquisition, it had around 70 employees, and the firm claimed 150 enterprise customers worldwide in commercial deployments ranging from a few terabytes to multiple petabytes, across demanding applications in digital media delivery, healthcare, Internet, energy and biotech. Few months before the deal, Gluster revealed a storage software appliance already combining Red Hat CentOS and GlusterFS, and running on any hardware from the Red Hat Hardware Compatibility List.

Red Hat created a business unit for this new storage activity in June 2012, based in Mountain View, CA, and headed by Ranga Rangachari, VP and GM, Red Hat storage business unit, who drives the Gluster acquisition.

The company does on storage what it did on compute: offering open source software, here only based on Gluster and running on commodity hardware. Red Hat Storage Server (RHSS) is a pure software-defined storage solution, an open source distributed file system that can scale to several petabytes and handling thousands of clients. It functions as a distributed data overlay, polling together storage building blocks over TCP/IP, aggregating disk resources and managing data in a single global namespace. The unified platform handles blocks, files, objects and big data (in partnership with Intel.) The Gluster file system is packaged with Red Hat Linux. "The biggest advantage is the use of hashing not database", said Rangachari

It solved:

• Enterprise-wide file sharing with a single access point across data storage locations
• Nearline storage for infrequently accessed data that needs to be online
• Rich media (audio and video) content distribution with petabyte-scale storage and high-read performance requirements.
• Performance storage for bandwidth-intensive applications like weather prediction and oil and gas exploration
• Centralized storage-as-a-service to enterprise applications.
• Backup target and archive for on-site or off-site data protection.

For on-premise, private or public cloud, the storage solution is available for the Amazon Web Services public cloud infrastructure.

RHSS was recently integrated with Red Hat OpenStack. Rangachari said engineers are working to add de-dupe and stackable modules, some of them being developed by the community.

He adds that there are 150 clients in test and evaluation, not all of them being paid customers. "The biggest one is in US governement for few petabytes. Big ones are a personal finance company in USA and a travel service in Europe."

Red Hat sells the products directly to large accounts and though the channel with about 12 distributors in Europe and 50 in the world, one of the largest one being Carahsoft Technology in Reston, VA.

Price of RHSS is not based on storage capacity, being $4,000 per node and per year including support.

Rangachari cited the names of EMC ViPR, Nexenta and CloudFounders as main competitors.