How Red Hat assembled an open source hyper-converged platform

By combining @Gluster Storage with its @Red Hat #Virtualization #software, Red Hat has thrown its own cap into the software-only #HCI ring with an open source offering. Red Hat Inc. jumped into the #hyperconvergence fray with the release of its own HCI offering. The product targets
organizations that want to implement hyper-converged systems in branch offices or for other edge computing use cases.

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is an open source software product that delivers compute, storage and network resources as an integrated platform. The platform uses Red Hat technologies, such as Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat Virtualization (RHV), Gluster Storage and Ansible by Red Hat.

Organizations can use the open source hyper-converged software to build their own HCI systems based on commodity hardware and avoid vendor lock-in and the high costs of proprietary equipment.

http://searchconvergedinfrastructure.techtarget.com/tip/How-Red-Hat-assembled-an-open-source-hyper-converged-platform

Red Hat Positioned in the Visionaries Quadrant of Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Two Years in a Row

RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- @RedHat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that @Gartner, Inc. has positioned Red Hat in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the 2017 Magic Quadrant for #DistributedFileSystems and #ObjectStorage for its storage solutions – Red Hat #Ceph Storage and Red Hat #Gluster Storage. Red Hat is the furthest to the right for completeness of vision and the highest in ability to execute of all vendors in the Visionary Quadrant. This is the second year in a row that Red Hat Storage has been placed in the Visionaries quadrant. .@redhatnews named a Visionary in @gartner_inc's #MagicQuadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object #Storage Tweet this Gartner’s Magic Quadrants are based on a rigorous analysis of a vendor’s completeness of vision and ability to execute. Developed to handle modern storage workloads and meet customer requests, Red Hat has made a number of investments in its storage products over the past year. New or updated storage capabilities include: Expanding container-native storage for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform across the hybrid cloud. Earlier this month, Red Hat unveiled Red Hat Container-Native Storage 3.6, which enables end-to-end storage for all core Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform applications and infrastructure. Release of Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 which increases the versatility of Ceph for object storage by broadening protocol support so that users can connect more effectively to and between traditional and modern workloads. Unveiling Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure, the industry’s only production-ready offering with an entirely open source infrastructure stack that is developed, sold and supported by a single vendor. Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage are both highly agile software-defined storage solutions that are built to handle different types of demanding workloads. Red Hat Ceph Storage is a robust, unified storage platform designed for object storage and cloud infrastructures at petabyte-scale. Red Hat Gluster Storage is a powerful distributed file system that offers flexible storage services across the data center's footprints – bare metal, virtual machines, private clouds, public clouds, and containerized environments. Both offerings can be deployed on industry-standard hardware. They are supported by an active community of open source developers and partners and used by companies around the world.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171023005815/en/Red-Hat-Positioned-Visionaries-Quadrant-Gartner%E2%80%99s-2017

Red Hat Ceph, Gluster roadmaps focus on HCI, containers

Roadmaps for #RedHat #Ceph and #Gluster storage reflect an increasing level of focus on #hyperconvergedinfrastructure, #containers and #bigdata in tandem with the usual performance and feature improvements.  Red Hat roadmaps are no secret, because they follow the development work done in the open source Ceph and Gluster communities. But Red Hat ultimately decides when new capabilities are sufficiently tested and ready for general release in its commercially supported products, and the vendor often adds enhancements and packages, as well as performance and sizing guides, to the mix. For instance, Red Hat recently launched an open source software-based hyper-converged infrastructure product that combines Red Hat Gluster Storage and Red Hat Virtualization and targets remote offices and branch offices (ROBOs). The long-term roadmap that Gluster product managers recently unveiled indicates plans to expand the scale and enable smaller configurations that start at a single node. The current minimum is a three-node cluster, and the maximum configuration is nine physical servers for the Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure product. "We're looking at scaling up for customers who need to go more than nine," said Sayan Saha, a director of product management for Red Hat's storage business. "And we have found that in ROBO environments, a lot of people want to start at one node. They understand they won't get the redundancy, but they want to start at one because that's all the space they have." Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure users supply their own hardware. But Saha said Red Hat hopes to find a validated appliance partner to bundle the software beginning in early 2018.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/450423256/Red-Hat-Ceph-Gluster-roadmaps-focus-on-HCI-containers

Red Hat Announces The Availability Of Gluster On Azure

#RedHat Inc. announced that its #Gluster Storage is available in #Microsoft #Azure as a fully supported offering. Through Gluster, Azure users will have a scale-out, #POSIX compatible, massively scalable, elastic file storage solution with a global namespace. This announcement also means that existing Gluster users will have another public cloud environment to run Gluster in.

Red Hat acquired Gluster back in 2011. Gluster is a #softwaredefinedstorage (#SDS) solution that enables easy management of unstructured data for physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Gluster is able to deliver rich functionality without specific hardware dependencies. Customers can now deploy Gluster on-premise and in Azure cloud, easing the adoption of cloud for Linux workloads. The POSIX compatibility also gives users the ability to move exiting Gluster applications that are on-premise to the cloud without the need to rewrite them.

Customers will find that deploying Gluster Storage in the public cloud shares many of the same procedures and processes for on-premise deployment. Customers can create Gluster nodes within Azure by attaching Azure data disks or Azure blob storage to an Azure VM instance. Two or more nodes make up a trusted storage pool that can live along side the application/clients within an Azure “cloud service” or can be located in a separate Azure cloud service connected by a common virtual network (vnet). Gluster volumes can also be created by aggregating together available capacity from Red Hat Gluster Storage instances. Once the volume is created, users can expand or shrink their capacity depending on business needs.

While Azure supports Geo-Redundant Storage (where six copies of data are spread out: three local and three in a fixed location), the second region data doesn’t support read workloads. However Red Hat Gluster Storage provides a geo-replication capability that enables data to be asynchronously replicated to another Azure Region. This would be beneficial for instances of greater control or disaster recovery.

http://www.storagereview.com/red_hat_announces_the_availability_of_gluster_on_azure