This chapter outlines the minimum hardware and software installation requirements for a successful installation, configuration, and operation of a Red Hat Gluster Storage Server environment.
1.1. About Red Hat Gluster Storage
Red Hat Gluster Storage is a software-only, scale-out storage that provides flexible and affordable unstructured data storage for the enterprise. Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.5 provides new opportunities to unify data storage and infrastructure, increase performance, and improve availability and manageability in order to meet a broader set of an organization’s storage challenges and requirements.
GlusterFS, a key building block of Red Hat Gluster Storage, is based on a stackable user space design and can deliver exceptional performance for diverse workloads. GlusterFS aggregates various storage servers over network interconnects into one large parallel network file system. The POSIX compatible GlusterFS servers, which use XFS file system format to store data on disks, can be accessed using industry standard access protocols including NFS and CIFS.
Red Hat Gluster Storage can be deployed in the private cloud or datacenter using Red Hat Gluster Storage Server for On-Premise. Red Hat Gluster Storage can be installed on commodity servers or virtual machines and storage hardware resulting in a powerful, massively scalable, and highly available NAS environment. Additionally, Red Hat Gluster Storage can be deployed in the public cloud using Red Hat Gluster Storage Server for Public Cloud, for example, within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. It delivers all the features and functionality possible in a private cloud or datacenter to the public cloud by providing massively scalable and highly available NAS in the cloud.
Red Hat Gluster Storage Server for On-Premise
Red Hat Gluster Storage Server for On-Premise enables enterprises to treat physical storage as a virtualized, scalable, and centrally managed pool of storage by using commodity server and storage hardware.
Red Hat Gluster Storage Server for Public Cloud
Red Hat Gluster Storage Server for Public Cloud packages GlusterFS as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for deploying scalable NAS in the AWS public cloud. This powerful storage server provides a highly available, scalable, virtualized, and centrally managed pool of storage for Amazon users.
Storage node
A storage node can be a physical server, a virtual machine, or a public cloud machine image running one instance of Red Hat Gluster Storage.