New appliances allow users to deploy scale-out storage in virtual and cloud environments as easily as deploying virtual servers
Gluster, a leading provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions, today announced Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances specifically designed for virtual machine (VM) and cloud environments. The new appliances give enterprises the ability to treat physical storage as a virtualized, standardized, and scale-on-demand pool in much the same way that they treat computing resources today, radically improving storage economics in the process. The VMware Virtual Storage Appliance integrates GlusterFS into a virtual machine for deployment on any VMware certified hardware or cloud platform. For Amazon Web Services (AWS), GlusterFS is packaged in an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for deployment on the AWS public cloud. The appliances are fully functional Gluster storage servers that pool storage resources under a global namespace with elastic volume management for data growth and migration with no downtime.
Multiple trends are contributing to the demand for such appliances: Unstructured data is growing by 60 percent per year, creating a need for vastly different storage economics; over 50 percent of all compute workloads are expected to be virtualized by 2012, creating a need for vastly different shared storage architectures; and, the cloud is expected to account for 12 percent of all IT spending by 2014, creating a need for storage that works both on-premise and in the cloud.
“The interest in scale-out storage has significantly increased recently as enterprises look for the most effective way to address scalability and manageability in such highly dynamic environments as the cloud,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Gluster’s new offering is representative of the types of major breakthroughs we’re seeing in storage technology for VM and cloud environments, delivering the scale-out architecture that is needed in a highly responsive manner thanks to its software approach to the problem.”
The Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances are:
- Tailored for VM and cloud environments: The software-only appliances are decoupled from hardware and virtualize the underlying disk and memory resources in a unified global namespace, allowing for limitless scalability. With this feature, enterprises are able to deploy storage similar to virtual machines and eliminate the need for expensive physical monolithic storage systems.
- Easy to deploy and scale: By scaling performance and capacity linearly, data is able to be added as required in only a few minutes without affecting performance across a wide variety of workloads. Additionally, storage is centrally managed across a wide variety of workloads.
- Supportive of multiple platforms: The virtual storage appliances are available in two versions: as a VMware Virtual Machine or an Amazon Machine Image, providing easy deployment on any VMware certified hardware or Amazon Web Services’ public cloud. This support delivers excellent performance across a wide range of workloads, including those found in highly virtualized environments.
“Over the past decade, enterprises have seen enormous gains as they have migrated from proprietary, monolithic server architectures to architectures that are virtualized, open source, standardized, and commoditized. Virtualization technology is at the heart of cloud computing, but unfortunately the storage side of the equation has not kept pace with computing,” said AB Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster.
“Gluster’s new virtual storage appliances play a crucial role in closing the server-storage virtualization gap and deliver a solution that is tailor-made for cloud and VM environments.”
The Gluster AMI is available in multiple instance types from Amazon Web Services. The flexibility of the AWS pay-as-you-go model combined with the elastic scaling capabilities of Gluster ensures customers only deploy and pay for what is needed when needed. Gluster offers a fully POSIX compatible interface that aggregates multiple Elastic Block Storage (EBS) devices in a unified pool. This storage pool can be accessed simultaneously by hundreds of clients and configured for high availability.
Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances for VMware are designed for virtual environments and run on any VMware certified hardware. With the ability to deploy in minutes in the same manner as standard VMs, the appliances accelerate the transformation of storage to more closely resemble the compute environment.
Product Availability
Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances will be generally available on February 15.