Virtualization.com

News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

storage

Red Hat Gains Gluster To Better Manage Explosion Of Big Data

by Leave a Comment

Red Hat, Inc. today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Gluster, Inc., a leading provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions for standardizing the management of unstructured data. With this $136 million cash acquisition, Red Hat tries to define a new baseline for how enterprise IT can better manages the explosion of big data, whether deployed on-premise or spanning into the public cloud. This helps Red Hat expanding into a critical part of enterprise infrastructure, enabling it to deliver open storage solutions that protect customer investments as they approach the new era of computing.

“The explosion of big data and the new paradigm of cloud computing are converging, forcing IT to re-think storage investments that are cost-effective, manageable and scale for the future,” said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president, Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat. “Our customers are looking for software-based storage solutions that manage their file-based data on-premise, in the cloud and bridging between the two. With unstructured data growth (such as log files, virtual machines, email, audio, video and documents), the 90’s paradigm of forcing everything into expensive, single-system DBMS residing on an internal corporate SAN has become unwieldy and impractical.”. Feel free to dive into the full take from Brian Steven on Gluster.

Founded in 2005, Gluster’s goal was to simplify storage using open source software and commodity hardware. The heart of Gluster is GlusterFS, a software-only, scale-out storage system. It allows enterprises to combine large numbers of commodity storage and compute resources into a high-performance, centrally-managed and globally-accessible storage pool. By combining commodity economics with a scale-out approach, customers can deploy abundant storage without compromising on cost, performance and manageability. Gluster has emerged as an innovative open source leader, relied upon by companies such as Pandora, Box.net and Samsung to efficiently manage large volumes of data.

“We are extremely pleased to be joining Red Hat,” said AB Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster. “We believe this is a perfect combination of technologies, strategies and cultures and is a great development for our customers, employees, investors and community.  Gluster started off with a goal to be the Red Hat of storage. Now, we are the storage of Red Hat.”
“Enterprises and service providers have struggled to manage their rapidly expanding unstructured data stores with conventional storage systems,” said Henry Baltazar, senior analyst of The 451 Group. “The scale out storage technology and expertise Red Hat is gaining from the acquisition of Gluster will serve as a powerful foundation for future public, private and hybrid storage clouds.”

In September 2008, Red Hat already acquired Qumranet, Inc. including its Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) platform and SolidICE offering, a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), which together presented a comprehensive virtualization platform for enterprise customers. With the addition of Gluster to KVM Red Hat now seems to aim at offering a cloud platform too. Interesting times ahead in the crowded cloud market.

Red Hat has agreed to acquire Gluster, a privately-held company, for approximately $136 million in cash. As part of the transaction, Red Hat will also assume unvested Gluster equity outstanding on the closing date and issue certain equity retention incentives.  The transaction is expected to close in October, subject to customary closing conditions.

DataCore Survey Suggests Companies Don’t Anticipate Impact Of Storage On Virtualization Project Costs

by Leave a Comment

A survey commissioned by DataCore (“The State of Virtualization”) finds that a majority of medium- and large-enterprise IT organizations overlook storage when implementing a virtualized operating environment.

The data reveals that nearly half of the respondents (43 percent) had not anticipated the impact that storage would have on their server and desktop virtualization costs or had not started a virtualization project because the storage-related costs “seem too high.” As a result, the rollout of their virtualization projects is delayed.

Of those that have deployed server virtualization, 66 percent cited a substantial increase in storage costs as the biggest problem they are facing. Nearly 40 percent say the storage infrastructure is either slowing application performance or limiting its availability, while more than 20 percent indicate that business continuity has become more difficult.

Over 56% now realize that consolidation creates I/O bottlenecks that prevent them from moving to the next level of virtualization.

The online survey of more than 450 medium- and large-enterprise IT organizations in the North America and Europe was conducted in January 2011. The survey asked a series of questions about virtualization and its impact on storage.

Blade.org – Study On Storage Consolidation

by Leave a Comment

Blade.org, a collaborative organization and developer community focused on accelerating the development and adoption of open blade server platforms, announced a new member-driven study on Storage Consolidation, the third of its kind in a series focusing on data center efficiency.

This Blade.org White Paper is available for download for free here. Blade.org member companies NetApp, BLADE Network Technologies and Double-Take Software each made contributions that showcase the advancement of technologies allowing IT professionals to reduce the amount of equipment needed to run an efficient data center.

Key Highlights:

  • Benefits of Storage Consolidation: Efficiency across storage area networks (SAN) has been increased greatly by sharing data across multiple servers on private networks. Operational benefits from storage consolidation include: reduced power and cooling costs, increased capacity sharing, storage provisioning, network boot, software updates, performance, data protection, scalability, simplified backup and recovery, and improved lifecycle management.
  • Server and Storage Virtualization – Complimentary Technologies: Storage virtualization compliments server virtualization by increasing storage efficiency and by enabling rapid deployment of storage resources. The result is increased overall operational efficiency, improved asset utilization, and accelerated business processes.
  • Storage Virtualization: Storage virtualization is delivering dramatic increases in storage utilization. Deduplication, thin provisioning, and rapid cloning, as examples, are greatly reducing the physical storage required to store the exploding data collection and retention in today’s business environment.
  • Storage Consolidation – Before You Start: By utilizing a combination of virtualization and SAN-based or host-based replication technologies, IT personnel can minimize data and application down time during storage migration while allowing users to still access applications with little or no downtime.

Virsto Raises $7 Million For Virtual Storage Solutions

by Leave a Comment

Virsto Software, provider of storage solutions for virtual servers, announced today it has completed its Series A round of funding, raising $7 million. The round was led by August Capital and includes Canaan Partners.

Canaan Partners was also a seed investor in Virsto in 2008. Virsto will use the funds to launch its new storage solution for virtual servers. The company will also focus on building its customer base and engaging new partners. Maha Ibrahim, General Partner at Canaan, will remain on Virsto’s board of directors and Vivek Mehra, General Partner at August Capital, will join the board.

Virsto was founded in the fall of 2007 to address the growing need for cost-effective and efficient storage for virtualized data centers.

Virtualized data centers are transforming IT infrastructures by reducing costs, improving performance and increasing efficiency. Server virtualization platforms from VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, Oracle, Red Hat, and others are being rapidly adopted as the technology matures.

Most data storage systems in use today were designed before server virtualization came about. The older storage techniques and technologies used for physical servers are not optimal for virtual servers. While existing vendors have tweaked storage solutions to work better for virtual servers, the products are inadequate, expensive and complex. Later this year, Virsto will launch a new type of storage solution designed for the unique needs of virtual servers.

Quest Buys MonoSphere

by Leave a Comment

Quest Software has acquired the technology assets of MonoSphere, a privately owned company headquartered in Redwood City, CA. MonoSphere is the creator of Storage Horizon storage capacity management software.

Quest has also hired a substantial number of the former MonoSphere employees.

  • Quest will continue to maintain, enhance, and support the Storage Horizon solution, enabling customers to dramatically increase utilization of storage infrastructure, resulting in significant reductions in storage capital spending.
  • Quest will also integrate Storage Horizon with a number of its existing products, expanding Quest’s leadership in providing complete solutions that help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases, Windows infrastructure and virtual environments.

Storage Company Nexsan Releases Assureon 6.0

by Leave a Comment

Nexsan on Tuesday debuted a new version of its archiving system, Assureon 6.0, which builds in scalability and security features, such as the ability to separate archiving between users.

The updated Assureon software includes Nexsan’s AutoMaid green technology, which is intended to reduce power consumption in a hosted datacentre. The Assureon system itself consists of disk storage, archiving software and servers in a single rack.

Nexsan uses its own method of storing data, called Maid (Massive Arrays of Idle Disks), which exploits the fact most disk arrays can be almost constantly rotating and therefore using energy. Maid uses smaller disks, but more of them, so that at any one time most of the disks are idle. According to Nexsan, the method reduces energy consumption overall.

Nexsan said Assureon 6.0 also features an innovative content-addressable storage (CAS) capability, which allows customers to virtualise a system into “an essentially unlimited number of physically secure archives”.

The Assureon system competes with iSCSI storage area network packages from companies such as EqualLogic PS 5000 and LeftHand Networks. Nexsan has not yet provided a price for Assureon 6.0.