Chapter 1. Introduction

Red Hat Storage is software-only, scale-out storage that provides flexible and affordable unstructured data storage for the enterprise. Red Hat Storage 3.0 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 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 Storage can be deployed in the private cloud or datacenter using Red Hat Storage Server for On-Premise. Red Hat Storage can be installed on commodity servers and storage hardware resulting in a powerful, massively scalable, and highly available NAS environment. Additionally, Red Hat Storage can be deployed in the public cloud using Red Hat 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.