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Red Hat Inc. announced on Monday at Oracle Corp.s OpenWorld in San Francisco that Oracle, EMC Corp. and Network Appliance Inc. now support its Global File System.
Specifically, Red Hats 64-bit GFS is now supported by Oracle for use in Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) solutions; by EMC Corp.s CLARiiON NAS (networked-attached storage) and Celerra iSCSI NAS systems; and by Network Appliance Inc.s SAN (storage area network) interface solutions.
Red Hat GFS is the first third-party cluster file system supported by Oracle for RAC solutions on Linux. Previously, Oracle had only offered its own file system for Linux systems running RAC.
GFS is an open-source cluster file system designed for high-performance enterprise workload. The file system makes it possible to manage a cluster of servers and shared storage as if it were a single system, by providing a common cluster-wide file system. This should eliminate conflicts and problems that arise when different servers want to access the same file at the same time.
The file system is also POSIX-compliant, so customers do not have to rewrite applications to use GFS.
It runs on x86, AMD64/EM64T and Itanium systems. Red Hat states that it can also support up to 300 nodes.
The file system is based on the several technologies obtained by Red Hat in its 2003 purchase of Minneapolis-based Sistina Software Inc. Red Hat then worked on the code and open-sourced it in June 2004.
Since that time, Red Hat has included GFS in RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 4. The Raleigh, N.C.-based Linux firm was already deploying the technology with MySQL databases and Hewlett-Packard Co.s BladeSystems before this recent round of corporate endorsements.
“Commercial users dont want to be lab rats. The endorsement of GFS by some of the biggest players in the market signifies this solution is really ready for prime time,” said Steve Dupplessie, founder and senior analyst at The Enterprise Strategy Group Inc., in a statement. “I expect well see lots of large deployments in the very near future.”
Indeed, Red Hat. also announced at OpenWorld that Polycom Inc., a leading provider of converged voice, video, Web and data solutions, will be replacing legacy Unix systems with RHEL and GFS systems for the further deployment of two key product lines.
“Reducing build times, processing multiple builds and having a reliable infrastructure was critical to the video product development group at Polycom. With Red Hat GFS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we not only achieved those goals, but also reduced our TCO and saved tens of thousands of dollars by migrating away from a proprietary Unix environment,” said Alan Alford, senior IT operations manager at Polycom, in a statement.