Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is continuing to push forward its new storage vision this week with the release of Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The virtual storage appliance is built on the open source GlusterFS filesystem that is now being actively developed by Red Hat. Red Hat acquired Gluster Inc., the lead commercial sponsor behind GlusterFS, for $136 million in October 2011.
The Red Hat Software Storage Appliance was the first product that came from the Gluster acquisition. The initial iteration was announced in December 2011. With the new AWS version, Red Hat is taking its virtual appliance to Amazon’s virtual environment.
According to Red Hat, the Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance enables users to aggregate both Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. The general idea is to help enable a pool of storage resources that can scale with performance.
Red Hat’s new storage appliance for AWS has also been engineered to take advantage of the AWS Availability Zones to ensure data availability. The system is POSIX compliant, meaning that existing applications will work without code rewrites in the AWS cloud.
The underlying non-AWS version of the appliance includes the GlusterFS 3.2 storage filesystem running on a Red Hat Enteprise Linux 6.1 operating system base. It’s not entirely clear how AWS version differs, if at all, in terms of core components. Red Hat did not respond to a request for comment from InternetNews.com by press time.
Red Hat has been aggressively moving to opening up and expanding both the Gluster technology and its community in recent weeks. The GlusterFS project now has an independent project board. The goal of the new board is to transform Gluster from an open core project to a real open source project.
