For businesses, storage is important. Whether it's storage for tax purposes, storage for legal requirements, storage to ensure the best in customer service or just storage to hold on to valuable information to use in a big data operation, storage is the kind of thing that serves many different purposes at once. For Red Hat (News - Alert), meanwhile, storage is part of everyday life, and the company has just recently announced its new Red Hat Storage Server (RHSS) to help drive bigger and better storage.

The RHSS release—RHSS 2.1 to be more specific—boasts several new features designed to make storage a simpler matter, including integration with the newest OpenStack release, along with a storage back-end for both the Cinder block storage and the Glance image service. There's also a new geographical replication system that allows for better data protection on a worldwide basis by using a WAN link to a remote disaster recovery site so as to better ensure data survival. Plus, Red Hat has also added support for Microsoft (News - Alert) Active Directory, compatibility with Windows Server Message Block 2.0 protocol, and the Red Hat Satellite integration system to maintain and provision RHSS, as well as several other new performance enhancements, making RHSS 2.1 a powerful new solution in terms of storage.

Not only is the RHSS system effective in terms of offering critical storage capability, which can in turn be put to use in a variety of methods, but it also offers some critical savings capability as well. In an IDC (News - Alert) white paper, sponsored by Red Hat and entitled “The Economics of Software-based Storage,” the numbers suggested that an RHSS can produce fully 52 percent savings over other storage systems, as well as a 20 percent savings in operational costs.

Those interested in seeing up close the kind of value that can be had can go check out one of the Red Hat Storage Test Drives found on Amazon Web Services (News - Alert), which allows users to try out the system and see how it works before putting the investment into it. Additionally, Red Hat is looking to bring some valuable information out to users with its upcoming webinar, set to run Wednesday, Sept. 18 starting at 2 p.m. The webinar, titled “Using Distributed Storage to Develop a Data Availability Solution Across Private, Public Clouds and Traditional Datacenters,” will give users a better understanding of virtualized datacenters, data availability within such platforms as Amazon Web Services, and information on potential challenges and issues around the use of distributed storage systems.

Putting storage to work for a business can offer a wide variety of benefits, especially if such storage is implemented correctly. Between the solutions that Red Hat has to offer, and the addition of valuable information about storage technology, the end result is likely to prove very valuable for businesses looking to take advantage of storage systems in normal operations.