Ranga Rangachari – Red Hat’s VP & GM – In theCUBE For Red Hat Summit 2014

Red Hat has revamped its Storage Server platform, adding support for the Hadoop framework and the ability to scale up to support larger volumes of data.

Released last week, Red Hat Storage Server 3 is the latest version of its software-defined storage (SDS) platform, which is based on the open-source Gluster project the company bought into in 2011. The platform runs atop Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, and comes with the newly release GlusterFS 3.6 version.

The added capabilities are designed to make Storage Server more suitable for Big Data workloads, operational analytics, file sharing and collaboration, says Red Hat.

“With this latest release, Red Hat is leading the charge on open, software-defined storage to help build agile enterprises that can rapidly gain competitive advantage by leveraging the tangible value hidden inside unstructured data,” said Ranga Rangachari, Red Hat’s Vice President and General Manager for Storage and Big Data.

Specifically, Red Hat Storage Server 3 comes with a boost in overall capacity and can now support up to 60 drives per server, up from 36 in the previous release. It can also support up to 128 servers per Storage Server cluster, up from 64. Red Hat says this enables the platform to support a greater usable capacity of 19PB per cluster.

Also new is the integration with Big Data analytics via an Hadoop File System plugin that allows Hadoop workloads to be run on the same nodes as the Storage Server platform. The Apache Ambari tool has also been integrated with Storage Server, allowing users to manage and monitor both the platform and Hadoop.

Additional improvements include support for monitoring using the Simple Network Management Protocol and the open-source Nagios tool, and enhanced data protection with volume snapshots for point-in-time copies of critical data. Finally, Red Hat has added support for Flash drives and an expanded hardware compatibility list.

Red Hat says the revamped Storage Server complements it’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise v1.2 offering for distributed block and object stores, which was released earlier this year.

The full details of Red Hat Storage Server v.3.0 can be found on this datasheet.

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