Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

Red Hat launches storage appliance for Amazon's cloud

The open-source company wants enterprises to move their network-attached storage to the cloud

Red Hat has announced the Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS), which can take advantage of Amazon's cloud while at the same time offering excellent performance, the company said on Tuesday.

"Essentially what we are providing is network-attached storage in the cloud," said Tom Trainer, storage product marketing manager at Red Hat.

The Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS is a software implementation on Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and EBS (Elastic Block Storage) that enables a network-attached file server to run directly in the cloud. That, in turn, allows enterprises to move all applications that can use NAS storage into the cloud without any modifications, according to Trainer.

Data is striped across multiple EBS volumes to improve performance, according to Trainer. That reduces latency and helps overcome some of the historic performance issues with Amazon's cloud, he said.

The appliance comes in the shape of an AMI (Amazon Machine Image), and supports NFS and CIFS for Windows access, as well as HTTP and Parallel NFS (pNFS).

Today, it is geared for unstructured file data, including content distribution. The appliance is based on Gluster's virtual storage appliance, a company and product that Red Hat acquired in October last year in order to boost its cloud offerings.

Red Hat has made smaller modifications, including changing CentOS for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, according to Trainer.

Availability is a very important aspect of any storage system, irrespective of if its based in an enterprise's own data center or in the cloud. Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services can do synchronous replication in one AWS region and multiple availability zones, according to Trainer.

Availability zones are engineered to be insulated from failures in other zones that are located in the same region.

The appliance can also handle asynchronous replication between different regions, Trainer said.

To build a system with high availability, a user can deploy a number of appliances in different availability zones, and have two copies of the data in the same region. Then the data is also replicated to a different region for disaster recovery.

The appliance costs US$7,500 per node with premium support. In addition to that, enterprises also have to pay for their use of Amazon's cloud.

The AWS launch is just the first step and in the near future Red Hat expects the appliance will also be available in clouds from other providers. But the company isn't ready to divulge which ones, according to John Kreisa, director of storage marketing at Red Hat.

Send news tips and comments to mikael_ricknas@idg.com

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: Amazon, C2, etwork, IFS, Linux, NAS, Red Hat

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: amazon.com, Amazon Web Services, cloud computing, Infrastructure services, internet, Red Hat, Software as a service, storage, Storage servers
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Oracle Database 11g Product Family
    Oracle Database 11g is available in a variety of editions tailored to meet the business and IT needs of all organisations. This paper outlines the features and options available with each edition of Oracle Database 11g. Read on for more details.
    Learn more »
  • How to Choose an SMB - Unified Communications as a Service (UCAAS) Solution
    The on-premise deployment of Unified Communications (UC) continues to be a source of considerable corporate angst especially for the Small to Medium Business (SMB) sector. IT research firm Gartner believes UCaaS will be adopted as an adjunct service by large enterprises and as a core service by SMBs before 2015. To help SMBs choose the best offering and develop a suitable roadmap Computerworld has prepared this special feature profiling the major offerings in the Australian market.
    Learn more »
  • Workshifting: a global market research report
    New business requirements are transforming the demands placed on IT. To operate effectively in today’s fast-paced global environment, organisations need to be able to get work done anywhere, anytime, by any type of worker to achieve the best results. This is the context for the rise of workshifting—the practice of moving work to the most optimal location, time and resources. As one of the most comprehensive reports ever conducted into the role of desktop virtualisation in enabling workplace flexibility and mobility, it reflects the growing consensus of those using technology to improve the performance of their organisation.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.
Recent comments