Red Hat Launches Open Source Software-Defined Storage Products

• By Rhea Kelly
• 06/25/15

Red Hat is updating its storage portfolio with two new products designed for robust data protection, performance and management at scale. Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3 and Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1 are open source software-defined storage solutions that run on commodity hardware, have programmable architectures and can handle various enterprise workloads.

Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3

Suitable for powering infrastructure platforms, Red Hat Ceph Storage has a "highly tunable, extensible and configurable architecture that offers mature interfaces for enterprise block and object storage," according to the company. Typical uses include archival and rich media and cloud infrastructure workloads such as OpenStack. Its new features and enhancements:

• For robustness at scale, improved rebalancing logic prioritizes data integrity over other automatic functions, and a new rebalancing "pause" feature reduces impact on performance during cluster changes. Time-scheduled scrubbing prevents automatic administrative checks from occurring during peak hours and affecting performance, and sharding of S3 bucket metadata enables bucket operation load balancing across a cluster.
• For enhanced performance: input/output operations per second (IOPS) and latency optimizations for Ceph running on flash storage devices (contributed by Intel and SanDisk technology); acceleration of virtual machine boot times using read ahead caching; and sustained block performance by limiting file system fragmentation.
• For operational efficiency: a lightweight, embedded Civetweb server to ease deployment of the Ceph Object Gateway; faster execution of administrative actions on block devices, such as resizing, deleting or exporting, even with extremely large images; 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 a scale-out file store with a straightforward architecture designed 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 can handle enterprise virtualization, analytics, sync and share, and rich media workloads, according to the company. New features include:

• Support for erasure-coded dispersed storage volumes that reconstruct corrupted or lost data by using information about the data stored elsewhere in the system (reducing the need for RAID and replication).
• Tiering — 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 high-performance for a variety of workloads.
• Bit-rot detection scans data periodically to detect data corruption resulting from silent failures in underlying storage media.
• 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.

For more information, visit the Red Hat site.