With organizations digesting an ever-increasing amount of data, software developers have no choice but to keep up.
That’s part of the reason Red Hat Inc. has boosted the performance of Red Hat Storage Server in its bid to encourage companies to follow its vision of software-defined storage.
Ranga Rangachari, the company’s general manager of storage products, said organizations want to “rein in the complexity and chaos enterprise storage is facing today,” so Red Hat has tuned RHS in a number of ways:
There’s been a 38 per cent increase in performance of replicating unstructured data over a wide-area network compared to the previous version of Red Hat Server, he said, meaning disaster recovery is “a lot quicker” than before.
The new version has also been tweaked with enhanced support for Microsoft Active Directory and new support for Full Server Message Block 2.0, resulting in a three times improvement compared to SMB 1.0 when it comes to fetching Windows files. Also, throughput to the OpenStack Swift object storage interface has been improved.
“With these performance and scale improvements we continue to raise the bar in terms of what customers expect for their ongoing scale-out storage environments,” Rangachari said.
Customers may find other changes just as interesting. RHS 2.1 now has full integration with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, a version of the server that includes the OpenStack software for building cloud infrastructures.
As a result, Red Hat [Nasdaq: RHT] can offer a complete stack with compute and storage supported by single vendor, Rangachari said. Although the two products aren’t sold as a bundle, there will be only one place to call for support for those using both. “Customers can get support from Red Hat soup to nuts,” Rangachari said.
Version 2.1 also integrates with the latest version of OpenStack (Grizzly), and offers support for OpenStack’s block storage (called Cinder) and image service (called Glance) protocols.
To improve usability, RHS now integrates with Satellite, the company’s installation and provisioning suite. RHS also now shares a management console with Red Hat Virtualization, a virtualization management suite for servers and desktops that now also covers storage. Finally, the upcoming Red Hat Storage Console, which is in a technology preview, has been updated to provide greater flexibility for managing storage clusters.
For those who want to evaluate RHS, there are three pre-configured use cases set up on Amazon AWS (covering enterprise file sharing, large object and file storage, media content delivery and storage).
Red Hat Storage was introduced in the spring of 2012 with the goal of creating an open software storage platform that — as all Linux-based applications — aims to leverage commodity x86 servers. Since then Rangachari has been picked up by many organizations looking to lower the cost of total ownership of storage.
Most organizations use it for active archiving, high performance disaster recovery and delivering content cloud across the enterprise, he said.
Integrating RHS with the OpenStack version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is essential for companies wanting to take advantage of software-defined storage, which enables the management of storage pools across the enterprise.