Chapter 1. Introduction

Red Hat Gluster Storage is a software only, scale-out storage solution that provides flexible and agile unstructured data storage for the enterprise. Red Hat Gluster Storage provides new opportunities to unify data storage and infrastructure, increase performance, and improve availability and manageability to meet a broader set of the storage challenges and needs of an organization.

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 different network interfaces and connects them to form a single large parallel network file system. The POSIX compliant GlusterFS servers use XFS file system format to store data on disks. These servers be accessed using industry standard access protocols including Network File System (NFS) and Server Message Block SMB (also known as CIFS).

Red Hat Gluster Storage Servers for On-premises can be used in the deployment of private clouds or data centers. Red Hat Gluster Storage can be installed on commodity servers 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 data center to the public cloud by providing massively scalable and high available NAS in the cloud.