Red Hat’s Clustered Storage Polishes Gluster

Red Hat has launched Storage 2.0, a brand new beta version of the Gluster cloud storage system which it bought in October.

The new private beta version supports Apache Hadoop for large data applications, and combines file-based and object-based access to data. It is the second Red Hat version of the Gluster technology, following Storage Software Appliance which appeared in December, two months after the Red Hat acquisition.

Red Hat Storage 2.0  allows faster file access within Hadoop implementations and opens them as much as data from other applications, said Red Hat. The combo of file and object storage also needs to allow users better access and simpler storage pools, the corporate said.

Gluster – whose name stands for “GNU cluster” – spun off from supercomputer maker California Digital Corp in 2005, with the purpose of constructing something better than Lustre , the open source file system which was bought by Sun Microsystems before Sun was bought by Oracle.

The file system can stretch to petabytes of capacity on as much as 500 servers, running on top of alternative file systems including XFS, NFS or others. It runs on x86-based Linux servers, and might talk over with RAID, SATA and SAS storage.

In Red Hat’s strategy, it underpins using virtualised storage  for enterprises, and will simplify storage management. Additional information here .

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