Red Hat Delivers Storage Appliance On Amazon Web Services

Red Hat is ready to deliver an online storage solution that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) called the Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services. Based on technology from its recent acquisition Gluster, the Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services is intended to provide enterprise grade cloud storage with high availability, performance and scalability. The appliance enables users to aggregate instances of Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon EC2 to obtain a highly scalable, virtualized storage environment that allows enterprises to leverage the cloud for storage purposes in addition to application deployment. The Red Hat storage appliance boasts asynchronous and synchronous file replication. Synchronous file replication ensures replication across multiple availability zones within a single AWS region, whereas asynchronous file replication enables availability across more than one AWS region. Importantly, the appliance is POSIX compliant, meaning enterprises need not rearchitect applications to transition them to the cloud. Because of its POSIX compliance, the Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services can accommodate Intel-based Unix applications.

Red Hat intends to make its storage appliance available within the platforms of other cloud providers as well. Provisionally, however, the Amazon Web Services partnership with Red Hat represents yet another coup for the Seattle cloud giant as it consolidates its branding as a one stop shopping ground for cloud, Big Data and storage solutions. Red Hat acquired Gluster, the company that provided the underlying technology for its virtual storage solution, in October 2011 for $136 million in cash.