Red Hat Inc. announced that its Gluster Storage is available in Microsoft Azure as a fully supported offering. Through Gluster, Azure users will have a scale-out, POSIX compatible, massively scalable, elastic file storage solution with a global namespace. This announcement also means that existing Gluster users will have another public cloud environment to run Gluster in.
Red Hat Inc. announced that its Gluster Storage is available in Microsoft Azure as a fully supported offering. Through Gluster, Azure users will have a scale-out, POSIX compatible, massively scalable, elastic file storage solution with a global namespace. This announcement also means that existing Gluster users will have another public cloud environment to run Gluster in.
Red Hat acquired Gluster back in 2011. Gluster is a software-defined storage (SDS) solution that enables easy management of unstructured data for physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Gluster is able to deliver rich functionality without specific hardware dependencies. Customers can now deploy Gluster on-premise and in Azure cloud, easing the adoption of cloud for Linux workloads. The POSIX compatibility also gives users the ability to move exiting Gluster applications that are on-premise to the cloud without the need to rewrite them.
Customers will find that deploying Gluster Storage in the public cloud shares many of the same procedures and processes for on-premise deployment. Customers can create Gluster nodes within Azure by attaching Azure data disks or Azure blob storage to an Azure VM instance. Two or more nodes make up a trusted storage pool that can live alongside the application/clients within an Azure “cloud service” or can be located in a separate Azure cloud service connected by a common virtual network (vnet). Gluster volumes can also be created by aggregating together available capacity from Red Hat Gluster Storage instances. Once the volume is created, users can expand or shrink their capacity depending on business needs.
While Azure supports Geo-Redundant Storage (where six copies of data are spread out: three local and three in a fixed location), the second region data doesn’t support read workloads. However Red Hat Gluster Storage provides a geo-replication capability that enables data to be asynchronously replicated to another Azure Region. This would be beneficial for instances of greater control or disaster recovery.
Availability
Red Hat Gluster is available in Azure now.
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