Red Hat hosted its annual Red Hat Summit and JBoss World last week in Boston. While I did not get the chance to attend in person, it seemed that Red Hat threw a great conference and came off as every bit the 800-pound gorilla they are. I was briefed by several folks at Red Hat and spent a lot of time talking to them about their plans for storage.
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I was very excited to see that they have really built on their acquisition of Gluster last year and have a great vision to become a leader in the cloud storage market. I spoke with Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager of storage at Red Hat, about this and the new Red Hat Storage Server 2.0. Ranga said:
"After several months of successful beta testing at leading companies around the world, coupled with the progress we've made since we entered the scale-out storage market last fall when Red Hat acquired Gluster, we're excited to remove the beta label and offer Red Hat Storage Server to the market. In the coming years, open source storage solutions and volume x86 servers are expected to transform the storage market in the same way that Linux and volume x86 servers transformed the server market, and with Red Hat Storage we're positioning ourselves to be at the very forefront of this industry transformation."
Red Had Storage Server is just on piece of the multi-part Red Hat Storage strategy. Recognizing that the cloud is the key to moving storage on to x86 hardware, Red Hat also unveiled several other programs that enable their storage strategy. All four of them make up Red Hat's Hybrid Cloud Solutions.
In addition to Red Hat Storage Server, there is also:
- OpenShiftTM Enterprise PaaS Solution: The leading cloud application platform for the enterprise. This solution will combine Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware to build an ITOps PaaS that is designed to deliver the speed and agility of PaaS desired by enterprise developers while addressing the governance and operational requirements of enterprise IT in an open and hybrid cloud. In the future this solution is planned to be expanded to enable customers to build a DevOps PaaS environment that is fully compatible with the OpenShift.com Public PaaS.
- Red Hat Hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Solution: The industry's first open hybrid cloud solution for enterprises, this offering will include the software needed to deploy and manage a hybrid cloud, including virtualization management with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization; cloud management, governed self-service and systems management with Red Hat CloudForms; and guest operating system with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat plans to include public cloud hours from leading providers with the solution in the future.
- Red Hat Cloud with Virtualization Bundle: Moving enterprises to the cloud for the price of virtualization, this offering packages Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat CloudFormsTM together to enable users to move to the cloud more quickly by combining virtualization and cloud management into the same project cycle.
I will write about some of these in a later piece, but wanted to concentrate on the Red Hat Storage Server for now. It has been in beta since shortly after the Gluster acquisition. It actually is a full stack from RHEL up through the Gluster file system. It offers superb integration with Hadoop (Red Hat is working closely with many Hadoop distributers). Also, Red Hat Server is available to run on the AWS cloud, other public clouds, private cloud and hybrid clouds.
Red Hat believes that hybrid clouds will be the dominant form of business for them over the next few years and this is why they have put such an emphasis there, with such a wide range of solutions. You can of course run Red Hat Storage Server in a private data center.
Make no mistake about it, though. Red Hat thinks that the cloud storage market will be as big or bigger than the server market was. They think that solutions like theirs make storage on x86 machines the dominant form for storage going forward. They are committed to being as successful in it as they are in the server market.