Red Hat Gluster Storage now available in Google Cloud Platform

By Sayan Saha, Head of Product Management, Red Hat Gluster Storage and Data,
Red Hat

Today we announced the availability of Red Hat Gluster Storage in Google Cloud Platform as a fully supported offering. Red Hat Gluster Storage will give Google Cloud Platform users the ability to use a scale-out, POSIX-compatible, massively scalable, elastic file storage solution with a global namespace.

This offering will bring existing users of Red Hat Gluster Storage another supported public cloud environment in which they can run their POSIX-compatible file storage workloads. For their part, Google Cloud Platform users will have access to Red Hat Gluster Storage, which they can use for several cloud storage use cases, including active archives, rich media streaming, video rendering, web serving, data analytics, and content management. POSIX compatibility will give users the ability to move their existing on-premise applications to Google Cloud Platform without having to rewrite applications to a different interface.

Enterprises can also migrate their data from an on-premise environment to the Google Cloud Platform, easily leveraging the geo-replication capabilities of Red Hat Gluster Storage.

A Red Hat Gluster Storage node in Google Cloud Platform is created by attaching Google standard persistent disks (HDD) or solid-state persistent disks (SSD) to a Google Compute Engine (GCE) instance. Two or more such nodes make up the trusted storage pool of storage nodes. To help protect against unexpected failures, the Red Hat Gluster Storage nodes that constitute the trusted storage pool should be instantiated across Google Cloud Platform’s zones (within the same region), up to and including a single zone.

Gluster volumes are created by aggregating available capacity from Red Hat Gluster Storage instances. Capacity can be dynamically expanded or shrunk to meet your changing business demands. Additionally, Red Hat Gluster Storage provides geo-replication capabilities that enable data to be asynchronously replicated from one Google Cloud Platform region to another, thereby enabling disaster recovery for usage scenarios that need it in a master-slave configuration.

Anticipated roadmap features like file-based tiering in Red Hat Gluster Storage include providing the capability to create volumes with a mix of SSD- and HDD-based persistent disks providing storage tiering (hierarchical storage management) in the cloud in a transparent manner.

Red Hat Gluster Storage in Google Cloud Platform will be accessed using the highly performant Gluster native (Fuse-based) client from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, and other Linux-based clients. Users may also use NFS or SMB.

We are excited that users will be able to take advantage of all the Red Hat Gluster Storage features in Google Cloud Platform, including replication, snapshots, directory quotas, erasure coding, bit-rot scrubbing and geo-replication, because they now have a compelling option for their scale-out file storage use cases in Google’s cloud.