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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.”