Red Hat's GlusterFS Appliance for Amazon Now Totally Virtual

One thing you don't quite get accustomed to in reporting developments in cloud innovation is how even the virtual things become virtualized. Last December, Red Hat released a software storage appliance based on the GlusterFS software-based NAS system that Red Hat acquired in October. That product is a way to apply the same methodology that GlusterFS clients used to build network-attached storage pools completely from existing storage.

So if a new customer wants to deploy a clustered file server with two EC2 instances and 150 TB of storage, the Red Hat appliance will attach that much EBS to those instances as part of its automated installation procedure. "We stripe our whole file system across all of that, and we benefit from parallelization of the I/O," Red Hat's Trainer explains. "That helps to compensate for and overcome a lot of the performance issues that users have faced in trying to build something like a file server within Amazon. What they run into is the mass network bottleneck that could exist within a public cloud."

Advances in Intel Ethernet 10 Gigabit Server Adapters and VMware vSphere 4 allow migration away from legacy Gigabit Ethernet networking.

This white paper provides network architects and decision makers with guidance for moving from GbE to 10GbE networking in their virtualized data centers.