The demand for storage is headed only in one direction, and that’s up. The cost of enterprise storage is a mounting concern for CIOs as there is added pressure to retain more data due to factors such as regulatory compliance and big data analytics.
Traditional, monolithic storage appliances are built on a scale-up model that is rigid and expensive. The only way to grow storage capacity is by throwing feeds and speeds at the appliance. On the other hand, distributed software-defined storage is built on a scale-out model that lends itself naturally to seamless scale and agility. Adding capacity is as simple as adding more industry-standard servers to the storage cluster.
The price-performance ceiling of traditional storage appliances
When we compare the price-performance characteristics of traditional scale-up storage appliances to software-defined storage such as Red Hat Gluster Storage, we see that as capacity grows, storage appliances hit a performance plateau, while software-defined storage scales linearly. On the other hand, we find that the cost of a monolithic appliance grows exponentially as we hit the performance plateau.
It’s important to remember that traditional storage appliances were built in the era before today’s diverse workloads. For that reason, Red Hat works with the top hardware vendors to build reference architectures that are optimized for performance, throughput, or capacity depending on the workload you’re running.
Unprecedented flexibility and choice
With Red Hat Gluster Storage, you run the same software bits whether the storage is deployed on premise, on virtual machines, in the cloud, or even in containers. Red Hat Gluster Storage offers you advanced storage features such as tiering, bit rot detection, geo replication, and erasure coding, just to name a few. When considering the 3-year TCO, including hardware and support, you get comparable features and performance for about half the price of a storage appliance.
If you feel locked in by your proprietary storage vendor, perhaps it’s time to give open, software-defined storage a try. Take Red Hat Gluster Storage for a test drive on AWS today.
About the author
Browse by channel
Automation
The latest on IT automation for tech, teams, and environments
Artificial intelligence
Updates on the platforms that free customers to run AI workloads anywhere
Open hybrid cloud
Explore how we build a more flexible future with hybrid cloud
Security
The latest on how we reduce risks across environments and technologies
Edge computing
Updates on the platforms that simplify operations at the edge
Infrastructure
The latest on the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform
Applications
Inside our solutions to the toughest application challenges
Original shows
Entertaining stories from the makers and leaders in enterprise tech
Products
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Red Hat OpenShift
- Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
- Cloud services
- See all products
Tools
- Training and certification
- My account
- Customer support
- Developer resources
- Find a partner
- Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog
- Red Hat value calculator
- Documentation
Try, buy, & sell
Communicate
About Red Hat
We’re the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions—including Linux, cloud, container, and Kubernetes. We deliver hardened solutions that make it easier for enterprises to work across platforms and environments, from the core datacenter to the network edge.
Select a language
Red Hat legal and privacy links
- About Red Hat
- Jobs
- Events
- Locations
- Contact Red Hat
- Red Hat Blog
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion
- Cool Stuff Store
- Red Hat Summit