Of all the propositions that a business can get in a day, it's hard to turn down the one that comes with the word “free” involved. Red Hat (News - Alert) is taking advantage of the common predilection of responding to the word free by offering up its own free item out at Amazon Web Services: a test run of its storage-as-a-service function.

Available in the form of the Red Hat Storage Server system, the storage option gives businesses access to a system that offers a unified form of file and object access, making it extremely versatile and available to access and use without having to rewrite any current applications. Cloud and mobility applications alike can both take advantage of the service to access data thanks to an object interface built around OpenStack Object Storage.

The end result is that Red Hat Storage Server can offer up a service that can be accessed by a variety of different devices and applications, but can can be done from a variety of access points, on the scale that's needed—up to Gbps' worth of throughput—and in the sheer amount that's needed as well, accommodating even petabytes' worth of total space.

The free test drives, meanwhile, will offer as much as five hours of server time on Amazon Web Services (News - Alert), and allow users to rapidly create and put to use a storage solution that can encompass multiple terabytes, with access to a variety of POSIX-compatible protocols like GlusterFS and NFS. There are even several pre-configured cases, like large file and object storage, and high availability for business continuity study.

All of this is really just for starters, asRed Hat will be augmenting these free trials with a webinar set to hit Wednesday, Sept. 18 at 2 p.m. ET. Titled “Using Distributed Storage to Develop a Data Availability Solution Across Private, Public Clouds and Traditional Datacenters,” the webinar will run down a variety of options in terms of building, managing and operating such a platform, including the potential issues associated with such a service and how to address these issues before becoming serious problems for the enterprise.

Cloud-based storage is a smart idea, particularly if it's used as a backup. The ability to access information regardless of location is a tool that can be worth its weight—so to speak—in gold for an enterprise as it allows business to carry on regardless of the conditions on the ground. Red Hat is going to offer a terrific storage alternative that can be just the thing companies need in terms of setting up such a system, and makes Red Hat a terrific place to start the search for just the right system for each company's needs.