28 June 2012, 10:34

Red Hat updates Storage Server appliance

Red Hat logo At this year's Red Hat Summit and JBoss World 2012, Red Hat has announced the availability of version 2.0 of its Storage Server product, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 and GlusterFS 3.3-based appliance for implementing Network-Attached Storage (NAS) solutions. Among its most important changes are features that enhance data accessibility and availability, including geo-replication features such as checkpointing, failback and failover.

The new version's "Unified File and Object Storage" (UFO) feature allows clients to access the same data, both as an object (accessible through S3 or similar APIs) or as a file (mounted as part of a POSIX-compatible filesystem). The new network lock manager (NLM) handles synchronisation when multiple clients access a file via NFSv3; an automatic IP failover feature for the Network File System (NFS) and the Common Internet File System (CIFS) has also been added. Like RHEL, Storage Server 2.0 offers several new features as unsupported Technology Previews – including an Apache-Hadoop-compatible data access API, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) support, and the web-based "Red Hat Storage Console" tool for managing Red Hat Storage 2.0.

Presentation of Storage Server 2.0 at the Red Hat Summit The "On-premise" variant of Red Hat Storage allows the NAS to be implemented on standard x86 servers; this, the developers say, can easily be extended by adding more systems. These systems may include virtual machines that run in public or hybrid clouds – Red Hat offers separate variants of the storage appliance for these scenarios. To clients, a Red Hat Storage NAS running on multiple systems will appear as a single unit. The system uses the XFS filesystem to store data locally and clients can access the data stored with Red Hat Storage via CIFS, NFS, HTTP and OpenStack Swift. An overview of the new features in version 2.0 of Red Hat Storage Server can be found in the release notes.