Virtual Storage Appliances | Gluster

Virtual Storage Appliances

Scale-out Virtual Storage Appliances

Data centers have embraced the transition from an unmanageable number of physical servers to a more cost-effective and manageable infrastructure by deploying virtual machine technology – in many cases using VMware.  Unfortunately, storage has lagged behind in its evolution and integration into the virtual era.

Many data centers continue to struggle with costly and cumbersome monolithic storage technology, where logical units of storage need to be carved out, configured, and added to an overall pool of storage. This type of storage has become the achilles heel of the modern data center.  Data centers require a new approach to storage, a truly virtual approach to storage, which frees them from the costly and cumbersome legacy products of the past. The new virtual storage must integrate seamlessly with virtual machines and must work on- and off-premise.

Similarly, as cloud computing has evolved, so have the requirements for storage to meet this rapidly changing “on-demand” environment.  Here again, storage has lagged behind in its evolution to meet the demands of users who embrace this burgeoning cost-effective and easy-to-acquire model of computing.  Many cloud services providers are locked into expensive storage hardware products that are not easily reconfigured in real time, and in many cases users have no say as to which storage products will actually be deployed for their instance of computing.

Gluster has recognized the inability of hardware storage vendors to fill the gap of storage innovation in cloud and virtual machine environments and delivered to market the Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance.

Virtual Storage Appliances provide you with the ability to scale-out NAS storage capacities from a few terabytes to multiple petabytes while realizing the benefits of linear performance increases and overall reductions in storage hardware costs.  With Virtual Storage Appliances, you can manage the explosive growth of unstructured data in a unified global namespace in cloud or virtual machine (VM) environments.

Data center virtual machine users and administrators, along with cloud service providers and users, are now free form the constraints of costly, hard to manage monolithic storage environments.

Gluster offers the following Virtual Storage Appliances:

The Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services packages GlusterFS as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) allowing you to provisionhigh availability, shared storage in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environments. Scale-out your storage on demand to accommodate changing workloads and pay for storage resources only when you need it.

Learn more about Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services.

The Virtual Storage Appliance for VMware packages GlusterFS in a virtual machine container optimized for ease of use with little to no configuration required. Seamlessly integrates with existing VMware environments allowing you to deploy virtual storage the same way you deploy virtual machines.

Learn more about Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances for VMware environments.

via gluster.com