Summary: Red
Hat's new storage server does more than just help you get a handle on
your enterprise storage. It also gives you what you need to manage big
data and ready-to-run partner storage solutions.
Remember when gigabyte drives were big? Recall when a terabyte
of storage was enormous? Those days are long gone when your business is
moving to petabytes. To manage that kind of storage you need a program
that can handle "scale-out" file storage. For your colossal storage
needs, Red Hat has a new open source, software-defined storage manager: Red Hat Storage Server 3 (RHSS).
Want to manage petabytes of storage? Consider using Red Hat Storage Server 3.
This new RHSS can run on your commerical off-the-shelf (COTS) x86
servers, and on OpenStack or Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. It's based
on open source Red Hat's GlusterFS
3.6 file system and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6. Red Hat claims
that RHSS 3 can "easily scale to support petabytes of data and offer
granular control of your storage environment while lowering the overall
cost of storage."
Its new features 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 19 petabytes per
cluster.
Improved data protection and operational control of storage
clusters, including volume snapshots for point-in-time copy of critical
data and comprehensive monitoring of the storage cluster using open,
industry standard frameworks, such as Nagios and SNMP.
Easy integration with emerging big data analytics environments with
support for a Hadoop File System Plug-In that enables running Apache Hadoop 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 significantly expanded hardware
compatibility list (HCL) for greater choice in hardware platforms.
Rapid deployment with an RPM-based distribution option offering
maximum deployment flexibility to existing RHEL users. Customers can now
easily add Red Hat Storage Server to existing pre-installed RHEL
deployments.
The net result of all this, according to a statement by 451
Research's storage research VP Simon Robinson, is that since enterprises
now want their IT stack to look and act like a cloud, "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."
This is more than just a product release. Red Hat also announced that it's partnered with Splunk, Hortonworks, and ownCloud
to create RHSS 3-based enterprise programs for log and cyber-security
analytics, Apache Hadoop, and enterprise file sharing and collaboration
programs, respectively.
OwnCloud, an open source cloud company, which is using RHSS3 to integrate with its own private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud,
is a living example of Robinson's point. Together, ownCloud and Red Hat
enables you to leverage your existing straphe infrastructure, with such
local server standards as LDAP/AD, SAML, Database, NFS, CIFS, while
being able to scale out to RHSS storage.
In a study run on HP ProLiant SL4540 servers, the two companies found
that their paired storage options with 40,000 concurrent users saw excellent cost of ownership (TCO) improvement
by converging the application server and storage server tiers onto the
same servers, compared to traditional solutions with separate storage
server appliances.
Want to see it for yourself? The companies have published a reference architecture so you can try deploying ownCloud Enterprise Edition and Red Hat Storage Server 3 for yourself.
So, if you're interested in serious storage management, I recommend
giving RHSS 3 a long, hard look. It will be worth your time and
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