Storage for the modern enterprise

Traditional, siloed storage is giving way to tightly integrated workload-optimized storage  

Last week, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 featuring Kubernetes StatefulSets, cloud-native Java, enhanced container security and developer toolbox.

Container-native storage enabled through the tight integration of Red Hat Gluster Storage with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is gaining customer traction across industry verticals and geographies. While we’re delighted at this success, we can’t but help step back and reconcile it with a broader movement in the industry toward workload-optimized storage.

Storage is not storage is not storage.

Overwhelmingly, analyst research points to the demise of traditional enterprise storage, citing lack of flexibility and high costs. More and more CIOs demand that infrastructure be application and workload aware, so it’s optimized to serve many masters. This demand, in part, has given rise to the software-defined storage market. Not unlike how the closing of the classic gap between Dev and Ops led to the burgeoning DevOps market.

One of the key themes of storage innovation within Red Hat is to make it invisible to developers and yet have it behave and deploy just like an application. Storage administrators, on the other hand, get to manage and scale storage with greater granularity, and expose simple GUI-based interfaces to developers with a goal of making the entire process painless to all.

In the latest release of container-native storage with Red Hat Gluster Storage, storage administrators can define policy-based workload placement across the cluster. In other words, they can set up quality-of-service tiers for developers so performance-centric workloads are deployed on flash-based storage and capacity-centric workloads are deployed on disk heavy servers. Developers - who generally don’t care how the sausage is made - will only see storage classes presented to them as Gold, Silver, and Bronze, for instance. Everyone wins.

Enterprise class storage.

As the software-defined storage market becomes populated with a large number of vendors, one thing is clear to me: Customers want an enterprise-grade product for production workloads, and clearly value being able to pick up the phone and make a single support call for an issue that could traverse their technology stack. This is largely the motivation behind the close integration of Red Hat Gluster Storage with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

In the latest release of container-native storage available today, Red Hat has gone further to expand on day-2 maintenance operations and enable geo-replication and snapshotting features that can serve multiple storage clusters in a complex multi-tenant environment.In addition, customers adopting container native storage can back their OpenShift registry with storage volumes served out from container-native storage.

Learn more.

Hear from Red Hat experts on the latest advances in container-ready and container-native storage in a free on-demand webinar. Learn how Red Hat Gluster Storage can be used to persist the container registry for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, in addition to a number of other innovations that make this storage for the modern enterprise.