Open-source software provider Red Hat on May 19 introduced what could turn out to be a popular new tool for developers: a scale-out shared file system service for OpenStack cloud infrastructures.
It runs on Red Hat Gluster Storage using components from the OpenStack community’s new Manila project. The announcement was made at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, B.C., which continues through May 22.
OpenStack Manila abstracts Manila file shares from underlying hardware and allows them to grow, shrink or migrate across physical resources. With Red Hat Gluster Storage and Manila’s IFS-Ganesha component, storage servers can be added or removed from the system dynamically and the data remains online while the system re-balances across the available hardware, Red Hat said.
The technology preview of Red Hat Gluster Storage with Manila at the summit aims to demonstrate the flexibility of open, software-defined storage for providing the file share elasticity required for enterprise public cloud deployments.
As data center-to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud deployments become more commonplace and larger workloads go online, numerous complexities set in. A shared file system service that scales along with all this new activity—and does not interfere with production—would be a welcome addition.
OpenStack Manila’s framework provides a vendor-neutral management application programming interface (API) for provisioning and attaching different shared file systems. Working in a multi-tenant cloud environment, OpenStack Manila operates alongside the existing OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) and OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) services.
Red Hat was the initial software-defined storage member of the OpenStack Manila project, a community-driven innovation that provisions and manages distributed file systems for OpenStack clouds.
Customers can test the functionality of OpenStack Manila today by downloading it from the OpenStack RDO community-supported distribution with the RDO Packstack Installer. The Red Hat Gluster Storage with Manila technology preview is planned for inclusion in the forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 release.
