Red Hat Storage Software Appliance

Red Hat, software maker and services for Linux, was engaged in software for storage systems in October, 2011 when he purchased the Gluster file system representing the virtual device providing access to the same data and as to an object, and as to the file.

2018: Release of Red Hat Storage One

The Red Hat company announced on May 3, 2018 release of a hardware and software system on the basis of the Open source software, technology of automation Ansible and servers of data storage. Red Hat Storage One integrates convenience of storage systems with flexibility and scalability of program DWH.

According to developers, Red Hat Storage One offers the organizations easier Plug and Play approach to acquisition, deployment and setup of software-defined DWH. In general it is the platform for creation of modular data warehouses created in close cooperation with partners of Red Hat in production of the server hardware and offering to clients the integrated hardware and software systems carefully optimized under requirements of these or those types of workloads.

Delivery and support of these complexes will be performed by partners of Red Hat, the Supermicro company which is already proposing the relevant decisions of a class "all in one" which include the server hardware, the software and support became first of which.

According to Red Hat, Storage One is open and building block solution which is easily scaled according to the evolving requirements of the modern enterprise. The platform gives the chance to combine flexibility of program DWH and convenience of traditional storage systems.

Specific Features:

• The convenience of installation — idle time and easily reproduced process of deployment at the expense of the specialized instrument of installation on the basis of Red Hat Ansible Automation together with previously configured configurations for use as storage of media content or universal NAS storage provides fast deployment of Red Hat Storage One at the enterprise.
• Optimization taking into account target loadings — the program and hardware Red Hat Storage One components are closely integrated with each other and carefully optimized from positions of performance and capacity of target workloads for which this or that solution is intended
• Flexibility of scaling — the solutions Red Hat Storage One are presented in the configurations numbering from 4 to 24 nodes. Besides, solutions provide operational expansion of capacity, including due to support of serial updates
• Cost efficiency — in family of the solutions Red Hat Storage One is used price model "all in one", including advanced services of data storage and ready for horizontal scaling.

The solutions Red Hat Storage One are constructed on the basis of a product family of Red Hat Storage which are intended for creation of the elastic storages adapted to a broad spectrum of workloads and enjoy high confidence of the most exacting customers from the different industries worldwide.

2014: Red Hat Storage Server 3

On October 6, 2014 Red Hat announced a release of the new version of the program configured manager of storage open source of Red Hat Storage Server 3 (RHSS).

New RHSS works at x86 servers, in clouds of OpenStack or Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its basis - the file system open source Red Hat GlusterFS 3.6 and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 operating system. Red Hat claims that RHSS 3 "is scaled for support petabyte of data and provides detailed control of the storage environment, reducing at the same time its total cost".

Features of the version

• The volume and performance are increased more than three times. About 60 disk drives on one server and 128 servers in a cluster are supported. Available volume — up to 19 PB on one cluster.

• Data protection and operational control over storage clusters, including instant pictures of volumes for creation of copies as of a certain timepoint and complete monitoring of a cluster of storage using the tools opened, conforming to industry standards, such as Nagios and SNMP are strengthened.

• Easy integration with new analytical environments for Big Data with support of Hadoop File System Plug that allows work of tasks of Apache Hadoop on the storage server, close integration with Apache Ambari for management and monitoring of Hadoop and the storage used by it.

• Wider scope of the equipment, including support of solid-state disks for the tasks requiring short delay, and significantly the augmented list of compatible hardware solutions increasing possibilities of the choice of hardware platforms.

• Fast deployment. The option with a distribution kit based on the manager of packets provides to present users of RHEL the maximum flexibility of deployment. Clients can easily add Red Hat Storage Server to the available preset RHEL environment now.

Red Hat recommends to use RHSS 3 for solving of tasks:

• storage of seldom used data for the solution of analytical tasks company funds of Splunk;
• implementation of the file system, compatible to Hadoop, for Hadoop Analytics use;
• synchronization and file sharing using ownCloud;
• support of infrastructure of multimedia (video, audio, images), for example, content delivery networks, on-line radio;
• recovery after accidents using Geo-replication service;
• operational storage of images of virtual machines for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization;
• storage of big files and objects (using the client of NFS, SMB or FUSE);
• active archiving and storage on removable media;
• storage of the backup copies created using Commvault Simpana software;
• implementation of corporate NAS and object storage and also cloud storages for service providers.

RHSS, according to the statement of the company, is suitable not for any tasks assigned to the file system. It is necessary to avoid tasks where are characteristic:

• active use of transactions, as in a case with DBMS;
• intensive transactions of input-output;
• mainly disk writing and frequent emergence of conflict situations;
• set of transactions with the directory and files of small volume.

Red Hat product portfolio on the basis of an open source code for the program configured storage is created as an alternative to proprietary technologies at problem solving, the corporate data caused by growth of volume.

Red Hat announced cooperation with the companies Splunk, Hortonworks and ownCloud for the purpose of creation on the basis of RHSS 3 of the corporate software for the analysis of magazines and ensuring cyber security, respectively, for Apache Hadoop and for programs of file sharing and the organization of collective work.

ownCloud Also Red Hat provided with joint efforts management of the existing infrastructure, using standards for local servers: LDAP/AD, SAML, Database, NFS, CIFS also at the same time is a storage scaling option to RHSS.

During the experiment on HP servers of ProLiant SL4540 of the company revealed considerable decrease in total ownership cost due to consolidation of the application server and the server of storage on the same servers, at 40 thousand at the same time connected users, in comparison with the traditional solutions requiring separate servers of storage.

2013: Red Hat Storage Server 2.1

The Red Hat company announced in September, 2013 a release of the new version of Red Hat Storage. The new version will help the enterprises to use all advantages of the software-defined solution for data storage open source, without sacrificing at the same time opportunities of a corporate class, performance and controllability. The company also announced new test drives of Red Hat Storage on Amazon Web Services (AWS) which will allow corporate clients to get practical experience of work with Red Hat Storage Server.

Mass transition to cloud computing and rapid growth of amounts of data, including unstructured, caused notable changes in corporate infrastructure of data storage. Requirements to the capacity of storage systems are calculated not by terabytes, but petabytes any more. The enterprises need the flexible and economic solution capable to cope with such unprecedented growth of amounts of data.

By estimates of IDC company, approach of Red Hat to horizontally scalable data storage can provide to the enterprises powerful benefits. Affirms as recently published research IDC devoted to profitability of program systems of data storage that the Red Hat servers open source for software-defined data storage allow to save up to 52% of the means spent for storage systems and also to cut down operating costs for 20%.

Red Hat Storage Server 2.1 integrates in itself reliability and functions of a corporate class of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4, the newest development of community GlusterFS — the platform for virtualization open source oVirt and the XFS file system. Such combination allowed to create new generation of software-defined open source solutions for data storage. Red Hat Storage Server 2.1 is tested on compliance to strict requirements to performance and scalability in the conditions of workloads on corporate systems of storage and is capable to provide all necessary for work with huge amounts of data and cloud computing.

Here some of new opportunities of Red Hat Storage Server 2.1:

Full support of OpenStack

• Clients can take advantages of private clouds, using the Red Hat Storage Server server and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform platform which are developed, integrated and supported by one producer.
• In OpenStack Grizzly release integration with the latest version of OpenStack with opportunities of storage of objects through API Object Storage (Swift) is available now.
• The internal mechanism for the OpenStack Block Storage components (Cinder) and Image Service (Glance).

The increased georeplication performance

• The technology of geographical replication expands possibilities of protection of global data and increases their availability. Regular replication of huge volumes of unstructured data through WAN on a node of disaster recovery allows to recover data in a short time. The testing held by Red Hat company showed 38-fold performance improvement in comparison with other versions of Red Hat Storage.
• Besides, georeplication provides anticipatory prevention of errors using the built-in monitors and also allows to gain a detailed impression about a status of transactions of replication.

The improved compatibility and means of protecting of data for Microsoft® Windows®

• Full compatibility with the ServerMessageBlock (SMB) 2.0 protocol, integration and support of MicrosoftActiveDirectory™ and also the increased performance — reasoned arguments to use Red Hat Storage for service of the Microsoft Windows files, the organizations of the general access to them and also implementations of the corporate functions "synchronize and share". The testing held by Red Hat showed 3-fold performance improvement when using SMB 2.0 and improved by the Active Directory in comparison with SMB 1.0.

New opportunities of support and control of servers

• Integration with Red Hat Satellite simplifies installation and operation of the Red Hat Storage Server servers and is the excellent solution for the enterprises which absolute control over processes of deployment and operation and also preserving of confidentiality is important.
• The updated preliminary version of Red Hat Storage Console technology provides more flexibility and functionality for management of complete lifecycle of clusters of Red Hat Storage.
• Thanks to integration of the Red Hat Customer Portal portal into the Red Hat Storage Console console users have the accessibility to useful information, articles from the knowledge base, to instructions, videos and other resources.

Besides, Red Hat offers a training course on administration of servers of data storage (Storage Server Administration), having passed which, system administrators and administrators of storage systems will learn to set, configure and administer a server cluster of Red Hat Storage. The rate is devoted to creation of a cluster of high availability with support of the CIFS and NFS file systems using CTDB, with the joint storage of files and objects and georeplication. Red Hat also gives an opportunity of obtaining the certificate in data storage area in hybrid clouds (Certificate of Expertise in Hybrid Cloud Storage) which is issued after delivery of difficult practice examination.

2012: Red Hat Storage 2.0

On April 9, 2012 Red Hat announced a release of the beta of Red Hat Storage 2.0. It claims that RHS 2.0 unifies data storage and the infrastructure used for this purpose, increases availability and controllability of big information warehouses.

The solution Red Hat Storage 2.0 is compatible to Apache Hadoop, provides the new option of data storage allowing to get quicker access to files and opening other applications operating with files or objects, the Hadoop data access at deployment of this system.

Among new features of the beta, according to the company, there is following:

• the unified access to files and objects. Red Hat Storage 2.0 is the industry-first file storage designed taking into account a possibility of its integration with object storage that expands access of the organizations to information within the uniform centralized storage pool;
• use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a basis. Red Hat Storage 2.0 is under construction based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 that provides development of reliable, high-performance and flexible operating environment of a corporate class. Expanded support of updates of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the XFS file system are applied to creation of a core of a reference operational platform in the device (a superstructure over Red Hat Scalable File System);
• the increased performance. It is reached at the expense of the accelerated balancing of loading, advanced instruments of setup and also optimization of performance of the Network File System Version 3 file system (NFSv3);
• compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. It allows the organizations to use Red Hat Storage as one of storage system levels for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization;

the improved controllability. Simplification of access to history of events, additional level of information on storage blocks, the increased visualization of transactions belong to new opportunities which simplify management of a cluster of Red Hat Storage even more improvement of data management using Network Lock Manager (NLM).