Red Hat updates storage portfolio

Red Hat has introduced Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3 and Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1 open software-defined storage solutions. The new features and capabilities for Red Hat Storage give enterprise IT administrators robust data protection, performance and management at petabyte scale.

Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage are open source, scale-out software-defined storage solutions that run on commodity hardware and have durable, programmable architectures. Validated to work with leading partner hardware and software solutions, each Red Hat Storage product is well-suited for different enterprise workloads, bringing compelling benefits to enterprises.

Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3

Built from the ground up as a next-generation storage system, Red Hat Ceph Storage is suitable for powering infrastructure platforms. It has a highly tunable, extensible and configurable architecture that offers mature interfaces for enterprise block and object storage and renders it well-suited for archival and rich media and cloud infrastructure workloads, such as OpenStack. Available today, Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3 includes several new features and enhancements, such as:

Robustness at scale, from improved rebalancing logic that prioritizes data integrity over other automatic functions, and a new rebalancing "pause" feature that reduces impact on performance during cluster changes. Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3 also features time-scheduled scrubbing that prevents automatic administrative checks from occurring during peak hours and affecting performance, and sharding of S3 bucket metadata that enables bucket operation load balancing across a cluster.
Enhanced performance, resulting from input/output operations per second (IOPS) and latency optimizations for Ceph running on flash storage devices, contributed by Intel and SanDisk; acceleration of virtual machine boot times using read ahead caching; and sustained block performance by limiting file system fragmentation.
Operational efficiency improvements, including the lightweight, embedded Civetweb server to ease deployment of the Ceph Object Gateway, and faster execution of administrative actions on block devices, such as resizing, deleting or exporting, even with extremely large images. Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3 also includes management support for multiple users and clusters via the Ceph UI and API, and API-based policy management that enables programmatic adjustment of failure domains and data placement.
Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1

Red Hat Gluster Storage is purpose-built as a scale-out file store with a straightforward architecture suitable for public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Offering mature network file system (NFS), Server Message Block (SMB), and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) file interfaces, Red Hat Gluster Storage is well-suited for enterprise virtualization, analytics, sync and share, and rich media workloads. Scheduled to become available later this summer, Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1 includes new features and enhancements, designed to greatly increase performance and security at scale, such as:

Support for erasure-coded dispersed storage volumes that reconstruct corrupted or lost data by using information about the data stored elsewhere in the system can reduce the need for RAID and replication and total cost of ownership by up to 75 percent.
Tiering's automated movement of data between "hot" and "cold" tiers in a volume-based on-access frequency gives operators fine-grain control to deploy storage clusters that are both cost-effective and highly performant for a wide variety of workloads.
Bit-rot detection scans data periodically to detect data corruption resulting from silent failures in underlying storage media, enhancing end-to-end data integrity.
Enhanced security via support for SELinux in enforcing mode and SSL-based network encryption to increase security across the deployment; support for active NFSv4, based on the NFS-Ganesha project, to provide performant and secure data access through clustered NFSv4 endpoints; and SMB 3 capabilities, adding protocol negotiation, copy-data offload and in-flight data encryption to allow for efficient file transfer and secure access in Microsoft Windows environments.
In addition to the new Red Hat Storage products, Red Hat will demonstrate unified storage management technology at Red Hat Summit 2015. This technology demonstration will show a single interface and common user experience for easily managing multiple storage and infrastructure solutions.