Red Hat
Modernizing Storage Performance and Scalability

According to statistics, the stellar growth of the digital universe is hurtling towards 40,000 exabytes by 2020. This petabyte-scale data growth is overwhelming hardware-based storage and IT budgets, necessitating means to cost-effectively store and manage data. Headquartered in Raleigh, NC, Red Hat offers a unified, open software-defined storage portfolio that delivers a range of data services for next generation work¬loads, accelerating the transition of enterprises to modern IT infrastructures.

While modernizing their infrastructures, CIOs today are challenged with disparate data silos—a blockade towards creating capable and scalable storage capacities. With Red Hat Storage Server—an open, software-defined storage platform for easy management of unstructured data for physical, virtual, and cloud environments—CIOs can easily build an enterprise-wide information platform that enables all unstructured and semi-structured data to be easily stored and harnessed. “Red Hat’s products inherent scalability and high performance makes it ideal for aggregating data that might otherwise be stored in siloed NAS devices, directly attached to an application server, or kept in expensive Storage area Networks,” explains Sarangan Rangachari, VP and GM, Storage and Big Data Business Unit, Red Hat.

Currently many enterprises have a hybrid cloud infrastructure approach that requires virtualized storage software to run in all types of cloud environments. “By running on standards-based commodity x86 servers, Red Hat Storage Server combines both file and object storage with a scale-out architecture designed to cost effectively store and manage petabyte-scale data growth while leveraging existing hardware and systems,” says Rangachari.

The product’s environment can be architected to support a variety of application use cases and performance requirements. “Adding nodes to a Red Hat storage environment not only expands storage capacity but also increases performance by providing additional input/output bandwidth,” remarks Rangachari. “Red Hat storage products have built-in high availability and disaster recovery that removes the requirement of any additional hardware or software to achieve high levels of data availability, both on-premise and in the cloud.”

Responsible for the overall strategy and execution of Red Hat’s storage software and Big Data solutions portfolio, Rangachari outlines the firm’s solid foundation, which is built with hard¬ware and software partners, as well as contributors, and leading open source storage software communities such as Gluster and Ceph. Red Hat’s InktankCeph Enterprise software-defined storage product combines the most stable version of Ceph technology—for object and blockstorage—with a graphical manager, enhanced integration tools, and support services. It enables users to define pools for storing data densely and therefore more cost-effectively.“The erasure encoded storage pools in Red Hat’s InktankCeph Enterprise provide enterprise-scale durability that can lower raw capacity requirements by up to 50 percent,” states Rangachari.

Red Hat’s proven and high performing solutions span industries such as finance, telco, education, and media and entertainment. It addresses specific use cases such as Big Data storage, cyber security analytics, enterprise collaboration and file sharing, and web-scale object storage. One among their clients is Intuit, one of the world’s most recognized brands. With TurboTax Online—an easy-to-use financial software that enables customers to complete and file their taxes online—Intuit already has 150-200 terabytes of customer information stored in its two datacenters a number that grows by 15-20 percent annually. Intuit chose Red Hat Storage Server and worked closely with Red Hat to tune the code, allowing parallelized replication between data centers that met their data availability SLAs.

The erasure encoded storage pools in Red Hat’s InktankCeph Enterprise provide enterprise-scale durability that can lower raw capacity requirements by up to 50 percent

The Red Hat ecosystem empowers customers with proven interoperable and high performing quality solutions, which is required for reliable 24x7 datacenter operations.“We connect communities of customers, contributors, and partners to further shape the future of technology to create infinite capacity with highly improved performance,” concludes Rangachari.