The appliances are designed for virtual environments and run on any VMware certified hardware or Amazon cloud platforms.
Open source storage solutions specialist Gluster announced the
release of its Virtual Storage Appliances specifically designed for
virtual machine and cloud environments. The appliances are designed to
give small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) 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,
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 Gluster storage servers that pool storage resources
under a global namespace with elastic volume management for data growth
and migration with no downtime.
"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, a senior analyst at IT research firm 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 software-only appliances are decoupled from hardware and virtualize
the underlying disk and memory resources in a unified global namespace.
With this feature, enterprises are able to deploy storage similar to
virtual machines and eliminate the need for expensive physical
monolithic storage systems, the company said. Additionally, storage is
centrally managed across a wide variety of workloads.
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 is designed to allow
businesses the ability to only deploy and pay for what is needed when
needed. Gluster offers a fully Portable Operating System Interface for
Unix (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.
"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."
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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