Building on its efforts to get its technology onto the major cloud service providers’ platforms, Red Hat Inc. announced that its Red Hat Gluster Storage software will be available on Google Compute Engine (GCE).

According to Red Hat, the alliance gives Google Cloud Platform customers agile and scalable file storage across public and hybrid cloud environments. Red Hat Gluster Storage enables them to deploy the same storage technology on premises and on Google Cloud Platform, so users can take their existing applications with them as they move to the cloud.

“Storage has evolved beyond a hardware-centric approach, especially as enterprises increasingly build and deploy applications on-premises and in public and hybrid clouds. Modern applications need flexible storage solutions that can scale out as business needs change, managing petabytes of data in a variety of environments,” said Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager for Red Hat Storage and Big Data, in a news release.

Red Hat said Google Cloud Platform customers will see the following benefits from deploying Red Hat Gluster Storage on GCE:

• Elastic scalability: Aggregating multiple Google Persistent Disks, Red Hat Gluster Storage can create a single, more secure and highly available storage pool that can scale to petabytes of data in minutes without disruption.

• Agility: The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX)-compatible distributed file system makes deploying a variety of applications to Google Cloud Platform possible by providing a compatible, universal storage platform without having to rewrite applications.

• Protection of on-premise data: With Red Hat Gluster Storage, the public cloud can serve as a backup or disaster recovery solution for production data or applications, enabling customers to replicate data from on-premises environments to Google Cloud Platform.

Red Hat customers will likely welcome the move, considering the complexities of file systems, said Brian Gracely, lead cloud analyst at Wikibon.

“File systems are complicated to get right, so offering a compatible file system with a popular open-source offering is valuable to Red Hat customers,” he said.

Gracely pointed out that the announcement does not mean Red Hat Gluster Storage is a storage-as-a-service offering from Google. Customers still need to operate it on top of Google cloud, he said, and that increases the cost compared to using it as a service.

Mutually beneficial partnership

Red Hat is well known for open-source technology in the enterprise, and all the cloud providers are trying to penetrate the enterprise market, so these partnerships make sense for both companies.

“Many enterprise customers are still concerned about compatibility, so having familiar technology available to them can be helpful,” he said.

Further, more customer applications and spending are moving to the cloud, Gracely said. In fact, Wikibon’s Public Cloud Market Forecast 2015-2026 says one-third of all IT spending will be in the public cloud by 2026. And Red Hat wants to make sure their software is easily available on any public cloud, he said.

Working towards that end, Red Hat earlier made Red Hat Gluster available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

The partnership is also important to Google, which is trying to gain a foothold into the enterprise, Gracely said. Previous collaborations with Red Hat include enabling Red Hat Cloud Access for GCE and Google’s joining the Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider program. And last year, Google announced its partnership with VMware Inc.

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