RED HAT GLUSTER STORAGE

Open, software-defined storage for physical, virtual, cloud, and container environments
DATASHEET

FEATURES DESCRIPTION
Container support Red Hat® Gluster Storage is an open, software-defined scale-out storage platform to easily manage
Persistent file-based storage unstructured data for physical, virtual, cloud, and container-based environments. Red Hat Gluster
from containerized Red Hat Storage combines both file and object storage with a scale-out architecture, designed to cost-effec-
Gluster Storage can be used by tively store and manage petabyte-scale data growth.
containerized applications over
Red Hat Gluster Storage delivers a continuous storage fabric across physical, virtual, and cloud
the network.
resources so customers can transform their big, semistructured, and unstructured data from a
Single global namespace burden to an asset.
Aggregate disk and memory
Red Hat Gluster Storage is used for storing various kinds of unstructured data, including:
resources into a single trusted
storage pool. • Rich media content like videos, images, and audio files.

Object access to file storage • Backup images and nearline archives.

Filestore can be accessed
• Big data — log files, radio frequency identification (RFID) data, and other machine-generated data.
using an object application
programming interface (API). • Virtual machine images.

Replication Built on the industry-leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux® operating system, Red Hat Gluster Storage
Support synchronous lets customers deploy cost-effective and highly available storage without compromising scale or
replication within a datacenter performance. Red Hat Gluster Storage eliminates storage silos by allowing global access to data
and asynchronous replication through multiple file and object protocols. It is also designed to work seamlessly with industry-
for disaster recovery. standard x86 servers.

Erasure coding Red Hat Gluster Storage can easily be deployed on-premise, in public cloud infrastructures, in hybrid
Enhance data protection by clouds, and container-based environments. It is optimized for storage-intensive enterprise work-
using information stored in the loads such as archiving and backup, rich media content delivery, enterprise drop-box, cloud and
system to reconstruct lost or business applications, virtual and cloud infrastructure storage, as well as emerging workloads such
corrupted data. as persistent storage for containerized applications and big data Hadoop workloads.

Bit-rot detection Today, enterprises are often faced with disparate storage silos, geographically dispersed among
Help preserve the integrity many datacenters around the globe. Red Hat Gluster Storage helps enterprises eliminate their silos
of data assets by detecting and unify their data by provisioning and managing storage, regardless of whether it is on premise,
silent corruption. virtualized, container application-based, or in a public cloud infrastructure.

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Tiering A FOUNDATION FOR CONTAINER-NATIVE STORAGE
Automatically move data COMPREHENSIVE STORAGE FOR CLOUD-NATIVE APPLICATIONS
between fast (solid-state drive)
As container technology approaches mainstream adoption, system administrators will expect
and slow (hard disk drive) tiers
many enterprise features (such as persistent storage), that were available to them in virtualized
based on access frequency.
environments. Given that ephemeral (or local) storage is not enough, stateful applications will
Security require that application data be available beyond the life of the containers that house them.
Support Security-Enhanced
Red Hat Gluster Storage offers two options for persisting data for applications running
Linux (SELinux) enforcing mode
inside containers:
with secure sockets layer (SSL)-
based in-flight encryption. • The first option is to attach distributed software-defined storage as a network-attached storage
cluster to the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster. This allows applications to persist
Snapshots
data into an enterprise-grade storage repository that is also POSIX-compatible.
Assure data protection through
cluster-wide filesystem read-only • The second option is to hyperconverge storage into specially assigned storage containers, allow-
and read-writable snapshots ing developers to manage and control storage more granularly than ever before, using OpenShift
that are user accessible for as a single control plane. In addition to lower cost through hyperconvergence, this option also has
easy recovery of files. the advantage of freeing up datacenter operators from managing storage outside of containers.

Elastic hashing algorithm IDEAL FOR PRIVATE, PUBLIC, AND HYBRID CLOUDS
Eliminate performance
AN OPEN, SOFTWARE-DEFINED, SCALE-OUT STORAGE PLATFORM THAT DEPLOYS ON
bottlenecks and single points
INDUSTRY-STANDARD X86 HARDWARE IN MINUTES
of failure with no metadata
server layer.
Scale out performance, capacity, and availability
Easy online management
• Web-based
management console

• Powerful and intuitive RED HAT GLUSTER STORAGE

command-line interface (CLI)
for Linux admins
Scale up capacity

...
• Monitoring (Nagios-based)

• Expand and shrink storage

capacity without downtime 1TB ...

Figure 1. Use case for private cloud: Datacenter

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Industry-standard SCALABILITY AND FLEXIBILITY WITHOUT DISRUPTION
client support Red Hat Gluster Storage is designed for unlimited scalability; storage can be added or removed while
• Network file system (NFS), data continues to be available. Bit-rot detection helps ensure the integrity of that data. Additionally,
Server message block (SMB) the elastic, scale-out architecture of Red Hat Gluster Storage lets users seamlessly grow storage to
protocols for file-based access meet the dynamic needs of virtual environments.

• NFSv4 multiheaded support EASY TO DEPLOY

for enhanced security An International Standards Organization (ISO) image installs on a server or supported hypervisors
and resilience (e.g., Red Hat Virtualization and VMware vSphere/ESXi) for quick deployment.

• OpenStack® Swift support HIGH PERFORMANCE AT A LOWER COST

for object access Red Hat Gluster Storage uses an elastic hashing algorithm to locate data in the storage pool (by cal-
• GlusterFS native client culating a hash on the file name), removing a common source of input/output (I/O) bottlenecks and
for highly parallel access vulnerability to failure. This, coupled with its large-capacity scalability, provides better performance at
a lower cost. Also lowering costs is erasure coding, which reduces capacity requirements for archives
Integration with Red Hat and cold storage at a lower cost per gigabyte.
OpenShift Container Platform
ELIMINATE COSTLY MONOLITHIC STORAGE
• Foundational element for
Enterprises can eliminate their dependence on costly, monolithic storage arrays that are difficult to
container-native storage
scale. With Red Hat Gluster Storage, enterprises can easily deploy industry-standard hardware in
• Container-native storage minutes for scalable, high-performance storage in their datacenters or in hybrid cloud environments.
built with Red Hat Gluster
Storage makes it easier to WITH MICROSOFT AZURE FOR PRIVATE CLOUD
provision and manage Red Hat Gluster Storage offers Microsoft Azure users a scale-out, POSIX-compatible, massively
persistent storage for scalable, elastic file storage solution with a global namespace. This brings existing users of Red Hat
containerized applications Gluster Storage another supported public cloud environment where they can they run their POSIX-
compatible file storage workloads. Learn more about Red Hat and Microsoft’s partnership.
Integration with
Red Hat Virtualization

• Centralized visibility and

unified management of
storage and virtual
infrastructures through
Red Hat Virtualization
manager console

• Foundational element of
Red Hat Hyperconverged
Infrastructure

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Deep Hadoop integration RED HAT GLUSTER STORAGE FOR PUBLIC CLOUD
• Hadoop Distributed File A HIGHLY AVAILABLE, HIGH-PERFORMANCE STORAGE SOLUTION FOR
System (HDFS)-compatible file AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS) AND GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM (GCP)
system eliminates overhead of
data movement
Scale out performance, capacity, and availability
• No single point of failure

• NFS- and FUSE-based data use

Requirements RED HAT GLUSTER STORAGE

• Intel x86-64 Xeon CPU

...
• Minimum 16GB RAM
Scale up capacity

• Minimum 50GB disk for

EC2 ...
system software

• Minimum 1x 1GBE or
1x 10GBE NIC
EBS
• Up to 60 SAS or SATA disks
...
per Red Hat Gluster Storage
node for data

• Flash/battery-backed RAID
controller that supports Figure 2. Use case for public cloud: Scale-out, network-attached storage (NAS) for Amazon Web Services
RAID-6 and RAID-1+0

• Includes all software to SINGLE GLOBAL NAMESPACE

deploy on bare-metal physical
AWS users can aggregate both Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
and virtualized servers (e.g.,
(EC2) instances within AWS environments, creating a highly available, virtualized storage pool.
Red Hat Virtualization or
VMware vSphere/ESXi) SUPERIOR AMAZON EC2 EXPERIENCE
Red Hat Gluster Storage for public cloud eliminates capacity limitations of a single device and levels
out performance variations across the pool, so Amazon EC2 customers experience superior avail-
ability and performance.

HIGH AVAILABILITY
Red Hat Gluster Storage for public cloud provides synchronous replication and asynchronous geo-
replication, so data is synchronously mirrored across availability zones and asynchronously across
regions within AWS.

NO APPLICATION REWRITES
Migrate existing POSIX applications to the cloud without making modifications.

BENEFITS TO THE ENTERPRISE

As enterprises struggle with the explosive growth of unstructured data and the accelerating virtual-
ization of computing environments, Red Hat Gluster Storage for public cloud provides an ideal solu-
tion for cloud storage. It simplifies the task of managing unstructured file data, whether users have a
few terabytes of storage or multiple petabytes, without acquiring new hardware.

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 FOR HYBRID CLOUD
OPEN, SCALE-OUT STORAGE SOFTWARE FOR HYBRID CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS
Red Hat Gluster Storage for hybrid cloud brings enormous flexibility to enterprises considering
deployment in both public and private clouds.

...
...

...
...

ON-PREMISE REPLICATION PUBLIC CLOUD

Figure 3. Use case for hybrid cloud deployment model

BUILT-IN REPLICATION FOR DATA PROTECTION

Red Hat Gluster Storage for hybrid cloud uses replication to provide high availability across
the datacenter and public cloud. Synchronous file replication provides local data replication to
support business continuity. Asynchronous replication provides long-distance data replication for
disaster recovery.

EASY MIGRATION TO THE CLOUD

Red Hat Gluster Storage for hybrid cloud is POSIX-compatible, so there’s no need to rewrite your
applications when moving data or applications from your on-premise datacenter to the public cloud.

SIMPLE, COST-EFFECTIVE DATA ACCESS

With Red Hat Gluster Storage for hybrid cloud, files and objects can be created and extracted simul-
taneously by various application environments. Store as a file and instantly retrieve it as an object,
and vice versa. This drastically reduces the cost for file and object storage and eliminates the need
for separate storage silos. NFSv4 integration enhances data access with broad client support.

BENEFITS TO THE ENTERPRISE

More and more enterprises are embracing hybrid cloud environments, using external clouds to host
noncritical IT services and internal clouds for business-critical applications. With Red Hat Gluster
Storage for hybrid cloud, enterprises can easily extend their datacenters to the cloud and achieve
increased flexibility, unified data accessibility, enhanced security, and simplified management — all
while minimizing costs.

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DATASHEET  Red Hat Gluster Storage

WITH GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM FOR HYBRID CLOUD

By deploying Red Hat Gluster Storage on-premise and in Google Cloud Platform, users can cohe-
sively manage storage for data and applications — regardless of location — and easily migrate applica-
tions and workloads as they transition to the cloud. Unlike traditional, hardware-based storage,
Red Hat Gluster Storage provides the compatibility and agility needed to quickly and easily adopt
cloud technology by unifying storage across environments. Learn more about Red Hat and
Google’s partnership.

ABOUT RED HAT

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-
powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage, and
virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services.
As a connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat
helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers
for the future of IT.

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