BOSTON. One year ago, Red Hat released its first commercial storage product.
In an exclusive video interview with InfoStor at the Red Hat Summit, Rangachari, vice president and general manager, Red Hat Storage, details where his business unit is headed. Red Hat Storage is built on top of Gluster, a company that was acquired by Red Hat in October 2011 for $136 million.
Rangachari stressed that there are multiple elements of the Red Hat Storage business plan, including community, partners and commercial engagements.
On the community side, Gluster has recently made a number of moves to further open up its community. There is now an open advisory board comprised of members from a diverse set of companies, in an effort to make sure it’s not just about Red Hat.
Overall, Rangachari said the plan is to have the open source Gluster community have the same kind of relationship that the Fedora Linux community has with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In that model, there is a community driven project and a commercial product that is then able to benefit from that community driven innovation.
Big Data
Red Hat is also working Mirantis and Hortonworks on Project Savanna, which is an effort to enable Hadoop workloads on filesystems other than HDFS. Red Hat is also involved in the effort to get Hadoop to run well inside an OpenStack cloud environment.
Red Hat Storage as a commercial product now also works with Red Hat’s OpenStack cloud solution. That support includes object, block and image storage file capabilities. Rangachari noted that there is still work that needs to be done to further improve Red Hat Storage on OpenStack.
Over the last year, Rangachari noted that Red Hat Storage has moved from proof of concept to a lot of customers running it in production environments. To date, Red Hat’s direct sales force has been a key driver, though moving forward the plan is to do more work through channels.