Red Hat brings container support and new operational and data integrity features to Red Hat Gluster Storage

We’re proud to announce the availability of new features in Red Hat Gluster Storage solution that introduce support for Linux containers and offer enterprise customers improved operational efficiency and data integrity.

Support for Linux containers

Red Hat Gluster Storage is now containerized! We’ve published a supported Red Hat Gluster Storage container in Red Hat’s container registry, which means users can more quickly bring up a Red Hat Gluster Storage container in a Red Hat Atomic Host or on Red Hat Enterprise Linux by simply pulling a Red Hat Gluster Storage image from registry.access.redhat.com and running the containerized image. This offers users the flexibility of running Red Hat Gluster Storage in a Docker container, serving out storage from local hosts, in addition to bare-metal, virtual machines and cloud images supported already.

Improved operational efficiency

File-based auto tiering

Promoted from tech-preview status, file-based auto tiering moves data from faster media to slower media - and vice versa - based on how often users access that data. The functionality, which combines SSDs and HDDs and is transparent to applications, places frequently accessed or “hot” data on fast media (e.g., flash, SSDs) and seldom-accessed or “cold” data on higher capacity yet slower-spinning media. This enables intelligent data placement resulting in better performance and cost efficiency.

Faster SMB access

SMB shares back-ended by Red Hat Gluster Storage now can perform better for streaming workloads. We’ve enabled the required configuration by default (async io), and we’ve seen significantly higher throughput with multi-threaded clients in our performance labs.

Writable snapshots

Until today, Red Hat Gluster Storage supported Linux’s thin, LVM-based, read-only snapshots. Now, the solution also supports writable snapshots: clones of snapshotted volumes with read/write permissions. The writable clones, which are more space efficient and instantly created, share the backend LVM store with their parent snapshots.

Offline console installation

We now offer an offline installation capability for the Red Hat Gluster Storage console via a fully supported Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) image, to help users install the console without a live internet connection.

Enhanced data integrity

Bit rot detection status

The bit rot detection functionality in Red Hat Gluster Storage periodically scans data bricks in the product, compares checksums and identifies and sometimes proactively fixes corrupted files. This release augments this feature so that users can identify corrupted files easily and take any necessary corrective action.

We are excited about all the new features in Red Hat Gluster Storage. For detailed information on all the latest Red Hat Gluster Storage features and enhancements, see the documentation.