An introduction to Red Hat Storage architecture

Red Hat

Abstract:

Over the past ten years, enterprises have seen enormous gains in scalability, flexibility, and affordability as
they migrated from proprietary, monolithic server architectures to architectures that are virtualized, open
source, standardized, and commoditized.

Unfortunately, storage has not kept pace with computing. The proprietary, monolithic, and scale-up solutions
that dominate the storage industry today do not deliver the scalability, flexibility, and economics that
modern datacenter and cloud computing environments need in a hyper-growth, virtualized, and increasingly
cloud-based world. The GlusterFS file system was created to address this gap.

Red Hat Storage is scale-out network attached storage (NAS) for private cloud or datacenter, public cloud,
and hybrid cloud environments. It is software-only, open source, and designed to meet unstructured data
storage requirements. It enables enterprises to combine large numbers of commodity storage and compute
resources into a high-performance, virtualized, and centrally managed storage pool. Both capacity and
performance can scale linearly and independently on-demand, from a few terabytes to petabytes and
beyond, using both on-premise commodity hardware and the public cloud compute and storage infrastructure.
By combining commodity economics with a scale-out approach, Red Hat customers can achieve radically
better price and performance in an easily deployed and managed solution that can be configured for
increasingly demanding workloads.

Red Hat Storage is built using the GlusterFS open source project as the foundation. This whitepaper
discusses some of the unique technical aspects of the Red Hat Storage architecture, speaking to those
aspects of the system that are designed to provide linear scale-out of both performance and capacity
without sacrificing resiliency.

Please complete and submit this form to have the white paper delivered straight to your inbox