John Mark Walker, Red Hat's Gluster Community Manager, stopped by to discuss Gluster, an open source project and the foundation of Red Hat Storage. Gluster is storage virtualization technology that supports scalable, high performance storage to support organizations' move towards "Storage as a Service." The technology is available as a software appliance that can execute on both physical and virtual systems.
We also discussed open source business models and how Gluster is freely available as an open source project while an enhanced, supported version is available as Red Hat Storage.
Snapshot analysis
As organizations move towards more virtualized environments based upon industry standard (read X86) systems, they often focus most of their attention on virtual machine software and the deployment of virtual servers. While this approach can offer some benefits if the goal is optimizing use of physical systems and improving agility of workloads, it doesn't complete address all of the requirements of a reliable, scalable, agile computing environment. It is really important for IT architects to consider virtualizing access to applications, access to the network, storage as well as considering how the virtual environment can be both secure and manageable.
Red Hat would point out that it offers technology to address all of those requirements and Gluster/Red Hat Storage is part of a virtual storage solution. This technology makes it possible to centralize storage to reduce overall costs and complexity of management, share files across the organization, provide a backup and archival storage solution, a form of storage tiering to reduce the cost of storage media as well as offering the high performance storage needed to support streaming media and other large and complex data types.
Red Hat faces stiff competition from virtualization and storage suppliers. BMC, EMC, Hitachi Data, HP, IBM, NetApp and quite a few others are addressing the same market need. Although Red Hat can wave the open source flag as a distinguishing feature of its approach, it hasn't grabbed the same mind share as have the others in this market.
Since the technology has grown through the contributions and requirements of many organiztaions, it has the opportunity to be able to address real world business needs that others may not focus on. It may also be able to win business from competitors when cost effectiveness is the key driving force.