Red Hat’s Clustered Storage Polishes Gluster

Red Hat has launched Storage 2.0, a new beta version of the Gluster cloud storage system which it bought in October.

The new private beta version supports Apache Hadoop for big data applications, and combines file-based and object-based access to data. It’s the second Red Hat version of the Gluster technology, following Storage Software Appliance which appeared in December, two months after the Red Hat acquisition.

Adding lustre to your cluster

Red Hat Storage 2.0  allows faster file access within Hadoop implementations and opens them up to data from other applications, said Red Hat. The combination of file and object storage should also allow users better access and simpler storage pools, the company said.

Gluster – whose name stands for “GNU cluster” – spun off from supercomputer maker California Digital Corp in 2005, with the aim of making something better than Lustre, the open source file system which was bought by Sun Microsystems before Sun was bought by Oracle.

The file system can stretch to petabytes of capacity on up to 500 servers, running on top of other file systems including XFS, NFS or others. It runs on x86-based Linux servers, and can talk to RAID, SATA and SAS storage.

In Red Hat’s strategy, it underpins the use of virtualised storage  for enterprises, and should simplify storage management. More information here.

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