How Red Hat Storage Fosters IT Optimization and Modernization

Happy Tuesday! Welcome to another new week and brand new post in the IT Optimization series. If you are new here, check out my first post, on what IT Optimization is and the latest post on the demand for a Modern OS. In this post, I will walk you through optimizing another key piece of your infrastructure - storage.

In my first post about IT Optimization, I likened IT infrastructure to a car. Let’s talk about trunk space for a second. Imagine that you are going camping with a couple of friends. You need a car with enough trunk space to fit all your gear, tents and backpacks. In this situation, you would do one of three things - own, rent or borrow an SUV. Owning an SUV for the sake of the occasional camping trip is expensive; a rental or borrowed car won’t have the same ease of driving as your own car. Now, what if you had a sedan, that could magically transform into an SUV, only when you needed it? Seems like a dream, right?

Traditional storage infrastructure has been around for a long time - we’ve all seen the evolution from Storage Area Networks(SAN) to the emergence and prevalence of Network Attached Storage(NAS). Traditional storage is like buying that large SUV and lugging all the space, or capacity, around everywhere, even when you don’t need or use it. It consists of proprietary hardware, is increasingly expensive to buy, difficult to maintain, uses an inefficient scale-up architecture and a closed development process. Despite this, traditional storage still maintains a firm foothold in data centers. Traditional storage does offer some benefits of performance and stability but it also causes vendor lock-in and inflexibility.  

Now, remember the Sedan to SUV transformation dream? Software Defined Storage provides a similar experience for your legacy storage infrastructure - flexibility, agility and ease of management! With software defined storage you can buy industry standard, off the shelf hardware - that can lower your cost and standardize your supply chain. You can also reap the benefits of having operational flexibility of the scale-out architecture instead of a scale-up one. Instead of hardware based intelligence (firmware) that causes vendor lock in, you have software based intelligence that can be tailored to suit your needs. Instead of being at the mercy of outside vendors, you are now part of an open development process that gives you insight into development, innovation, flexibility, and complete control of your entire storage infrastructure.

So, where does Red Hat fit in the storage optimization story? Red Hat Storage is Software Defined Storage!  We have products that cater to a wide range of workload needs: Red Hat Gluster Storage, Red Hat Ceph Gluster Storage, Red Hat Storage One and Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure.  Gluster is extremely well suited for dev-ops environments as well as many environments where legacy file systems are currently employed. Ceph, on the other hand, is tightly integrated with OpenStack and has proven to be the SDS of choice for those deployments. Both products bring a shared-nothing, scale out architecture, that equips your infrastructure with durability and flexibility. They reduce operational overhead with self-managing and self healing features. Both have a standard interface with a rich set of APIs that foster seamless integration.  And what’s the Red Hat advantage? We work with a large ecosystem of hardware vendors and partners , who are also active participants in the upstream communities of both projects. Red Hat also offers you the  support of Red Hat experts who can help you further tune your storage infrastructure.

Built on Red Hat Virtualization and Red Hat Gluster Storage, Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure provides simplified planning and procurement, streamlined deployment and management, and a single support stack for virtual compute and virtual storage resources.  

Red Hat Storage One, built on Red Hat Gluster Storage, is designed to provide more of a plug-and-play approach to the procurement, deployment, and performance tuning of software-defined storage, ushering in a new wave of enterprise storage to meet the varying demands of modern workloads. Red Hat Storage One is a platform of pre-engineered systems, created in close collaboration with Red Hat’s server hardware partners, that delivers tightly packaged workload-optimized storage solutions. The fulfillment and support is offered via Red Hat’s hardware partner ecosystem.

To learn more about how Red Hat Storage can help you modernize your storage, visit the Red Hat Booth at Summit!. Also stow away your excess baggage at the Red Hat Storage lockers near the registration area at Summit to win cool prizes all week! If you can’t make it there in person, Keep Calm and Subscribe to this blog - where we bring you optimization related posts, technical deep-dives and demos that can help you transform your IT infrastructure!