Red Hat Storage Server 3.0 Features and Benefits

Please note: Red Hat Storage Server has a new name: Red Hat Gluster Storage. Learn more about it, and Red Hat Ceph Storage, here: http://red.ht/1Hw7gYb

We've received many enquiries (thanks and keep them coming!) into the recent Red Hat Storage Server 3 release announcement. Here is the full Red Hat Storage Server 3.0 features and benefits:

Overview

Red Hat Storage Server 3 (RHSS3)  combines Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and GlusterFS 3.6 to create a massively scalable, high performance, highly-available and cost-effective storage offering. This release introduces volume snapshots, monitoring using Nagios, increased usable capacity per storage server, Hadoop workload support, non-disruptive upgrade from the previous version and supportability enhancements to address your data protection and storage management challenges for unstructured and big data storage.

RHSS3 is rigorously qualified to meet exacting performance and scale demands for next generation enterprise and cloud storage deployments and is tightly integrated with Red Hat's Scalable File-system (XFS file system).

Local snapshots for disk based backup

The snapshot feature provides a point-in-time copy of Red Hat Storage volume(s) that enables file and volume restoration. Snapshots can be taken online. This means the file-system (and its associated data) continue to be available to applications and users while snapshots are being taken. Red Hat Storage Server supports up to 256 snapshots per volume. A simple and intuitive command line interface for creating, managing and restoring snapshots ships with this release. You can back up the snapshots taken on a Red Hat Storage Server volume easily to address data protection needs of the modern data center.

Monitoring using Nagios

This release of Red Hat Storage Server introduces monitoring using Nagios - an open IT infrastructure monitoring framework (http://www.nagios.org/). A wide range of monitoring capabilities are included with the storage server which you can leverage to monitor the storage cluster, including monitoring of virtual and physical resources, failure alerts, and advanced reporting features. The Monitoring functionality based on Nagios is packaged to work in conjunction with Red Hat Storage Console or can be set up to run in a standalone mode. You may also integrate it with your existing Nagios infrastructure or 3rd party management platforms.

Scalability Improvement

You can now attach up to 60 disk drives to each Server node, compared to 36 disks previously. This greatly enhances the supported storage capacity available for each server per subscription. With 6 TB disk drives now available, you can create a 1 PB storage pool with just 3 Red Hat Storage Servers. Each storage cluster now supports up to 128 nodes, up from 64 nodes.

Hadoop Plug-in

Red Hat Storage now offers a Hadoop File System plugin that enables Hadoop distributions. You can now run analytics on stored data without having to transfer it to a Hadoop compatible platform. Benefits of using Red Hat Storage Server for Hadoop Analytics workloads include: data ingestion via NFS & FUSE, no single point of failure, POSIX compliance, co-location of data and computation, ability to run Hadoop jobs across across multiple namespaces using multiple Red Hat Storage volumes, and strong disaster recovery capabilities.

More Information

For more information about the Red Hat Storage Server 3.0 release, refer to the full release notes,to learn more about the product go to the product page, and to see the announcement, watch the video.