UPDATED 14:00 EDT / NOVEMBER 11 2016

NEWS

Software-defined storage morphs from ‘cost play to innovation play’ | #KubeCon

Since 2010, storage has been at the center of disruption, especially with the advent of big data and the expansion of cloud. And companies like Red Hat Inc. are creating storage platforms using open-source containers. Red Hat Gluster Storage is a scalable data management platform that streamlines file and object access across physical, virtual and cloud environments. And Gluster Storage containers are orchestrated using Kubernetes, the open-source container cluster management software project by Google.

Sayan Saha, head of product management, storage and data business at Red Hat, joined John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during KubeCon, held in Seattle, WA, to discuss software-defined storage and what differentiates Red Hat Gluster from the rest of the market.

Modern storage for modern workloads

Furrier started the discussion by asking Saha what his thoughts were on Kubernetes and container-native technologies.

“Software-defined storage has crossed the chasm; Gartner rated Red Hat as a ‘visionary’ in distributed file systems and object storage a few weeks ago. When we started on this journey, a few years back, software-defined storage was more like a cost play, but it has changed in the last several years, becoming more often innovation play,” said Saha.

He also mentioned that Red Hat Gluster has added a series of innovations in the last several years to enable it to run in different kinds of environments, including inside a container, as well as public cloud, etc., so that it can have a consistent storage platform across the hybrid cloud. “Customers need modern storage for their modern workloads, and we see that happening,” said Saha.

Red Hat Gluster’s differentiators

Furrier asked how Red Hat Gluster is different from NAS (network-attached storage) appliances that customers already have, where they roll out the stack and rack, and the storage, but the tools and software may not be in the language that the DevOps people want. How does Gluster solve that?

Saha said that its key differentiators are flexibility, programmability, and that it’s a fully featured storage platform.

“When we talk about flexibility, we spend a lot of time working with Gluster to make it work inside a container. So you can actually download a Gluster container from the Red Hat registry and run, which serves out storage and provides storage services, like application continuous, which does application,” said Saha.

Regarding programmability, Saha explained that they have worked on features for Gluster so that it is easy to allocate storage volumes from a developer standpoint, so that developers can simply request ‘x’ amount of storage and get it, without asking a storage admin to carve out space for them.

“Gluster is a mature storage product; it has a full set of enterprise-grade class features, including snapshot in cloning, recording, tiering. It’s not a stripped-down storage platform,” he said.

*Disclosure: The Linux Foundation and other companies sponsor some KubeCon 2016 segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither The Linux Foundation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE

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