Introducing Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.4: Feature overview

By Anand Paladugu, Principal Product Manager

We're pleased to announce that Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.4 is now Generally Available!

Since this release is a full rebase with the upstream, it consolidates many bug fixes, thus giving you a greater degree of overall stability for both container storage and traditional file serving use cases. Given that Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage is based on Red Hat Gluster Storage, these fixes will also be embedded in the 3.10 release of OpenShift Container Storage. To enable you to refresh your Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6-based Red Hat Gluster Storage installations, this release supports upgrading your Red Hat Gluster Storage servers from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7. Last, you can now deploy Red Hat Gluster Storage Web Administrator with minimal resources, which also offers robust and feature-rich monitoring capabilities.

Here is an overview of the new features delivered in Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.4:

Support for upgrading Red Hat Gluster Storage from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7

Many customers like to ensure they're on the latest and greatest RHEL in their infrastructures. Two scenarios are now supported for upgrading RHEL servers in a Red Hat Gluster Storage deployment from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7:

1. Red Hat Gluster Storage version is <= 3.3.x and the underlying RHEL version is <= latest version of 6.x. The upgrade process updates Red Hat Gluster Storage to version 3.4 and the underlying RHEL version to the latest version of RHEL 7.
2. Red Hat Gluster Storage version is 3.4 and the underlying RHEL version is the latest version of 6.x. The upgrade process keeps the Red Hat Gluster Storage version at 3.4 and upgrades the underlying RHEL version to the latest version of RHEL 7.

MacOS client support

Mac workstations continue to make inroads into corporate infrastructures. Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.4 supports MacOS as a Server Message Block (SMB) client and thereby allows customers to map SMB shares backed by Red Hat Gluster Storage in the MAC finder tool.

Punch hole support for third-party applications

The "punch hole" feature provides the benefit of freeing up physical disk space when portions of a file are de-referenced. For example, suppose you've used up 20 Gigs of your disk space for backing up a file, and some portions of the file are de-referenced due to data duplication. Without punch hole support, the 20 Gigs remain occupied in the underlying physical hard disk. With support for punch holes, however, third-party applications can "punch a hole" corresponding to the portions of the deleted files, thereby freeing up physical disk space. This further helps to reduce storage costs associated with backing up and archiving those virtual machines (VMs).

Subdirectory exports using the Gluster Fuse protocol now fully supported

Beginning with Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.4, subdirectory export using Fuse is now fully supported. This feature provides namespace isolation where a single Gluster volume can be shared to many clients, and they can be mounting only a subset of the volume (namespace) (i.e., a subdirectory). You can also export a subdirectory of the already exported volume, to utilize space left in the volume for a different project.

Red Hat Gluster Storage web admin enhancements

The Web Administration tool delivers browser-based graphing, trending, monitoring, and alerting for Red Hat Gluster Storage in the enterprise. This latest Red Hat Gluster Storage release optimizes this web admin tool to consume fewer resources and allow greater scaling to monitor larger clusters than in the past.

Faster directory lookups using the Gluster NFS-Ganesha server

In Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.4, the Readdirp API is extended and enhanced to return handles along with directory stats as part of its reply, thereby reducing NFS operations latency.

In internal testing, performance gains were noticed for all directory operations when compared to Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.3.1. For example, make directory operations improved by up to 31%, file create operations have improved by up to 42%, and file read operations have improved by up to 150%.

Want to learn more?

For hands-on experience with Red Hat Gluster Storage, check out our test drive.