Availability of Red Hat Gluster Storage in Microsoft Azure

Sayan Saha, head of Product Management, Red Hat Gluster Storage and Big Data, Red Hat

Today, we announced our plans to make several Red Hat offerings, including Red Hat Gluster Storage, available in Microsoft Azure as fully supported offerings. Red Hat Gluster Storage offers Azure users a scale-out, POSIX compatible, massively scalable, elastic file storage solution with a global namespace.

This offering brings existing users of Red Hat Gluster Storage another supported public cloud environment where they can they run their POSIX compatible file storage workloads.

Conversely, existing Azure users can look forward to having access to Red Hat Gluster Storage which they can use for several cloud storage use-cases including archival, rich media streaming, big data analytics, and disaster recovery. POSIX compatibility will provide users the ability to move their existing on-premise applications to Azure without the need to rewrite them.

Red Hat Gluster Storage is a software-defined storage solution, engineered to deliver rich functionality without specific hardware dependencies. Customers may now deploy Red Hat Gluster Storage in on-premise and Azure based solutions, addressing potential concerns around cloud adoption for their Linux workloads.

Deploying Red Hat Gluster Storage for Public Cloud uses many of the same processes and procedures already in place for an on-premise deployment. A Red Hat Gluster Storage for Public Cloud subscription enables customers to download and build a VM image for deployment within Azure. By adopting this approach organisations are able to customise their template image to align with their specific operational and security best practices.

A Red Hat Gluster Storage node in Azure is created by attaching Azure data disks to an Azure VM instance. Two or more such nodes make up the trusted storage pool of storage nodes. This trusted storage pool can live along-side the application/clients within an Azure “cloud service” or can be located in a separate Azure cloud service connected by a common virtual network (vnet).

Gluster volumes are created by aggregating together available capacity from Red Hat Gluster Storage instances. Capacity can be dynamically expanded or shrunk to meet your changing business demands. The Red Hat Gluster Instances exploit Azure’s “availability sets”, helping to maintain data availability during planned or unplanned outages within the Azure service.

Azure’s default data protection scheme is Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS). This provides six copies of your data, three local and an additional three in another ‘fixed’ region. However, data sent to the second region cannot support read workloads. In scenarios where read workloads are desirable, or more control is needed for disaster recovery, Red Hat Gluster Storage provides a geo-replication capability that enables data to be asynchronously replicated to another Azure Region of your choosing. Red Hat Gluster Storage’s geo-replication capability also has the potential to support on-premise to Azure hybrid use cases.

We are thrilled that users will be able to take advantage of the Red Hat Gluster Storage features in Azure, including snapshots, quota, erasure coding, tiering and geo-replication, providing Azure users with an interesting and compelling option for their file storage use cases.