Red Hat Adds Gluster Software-Defined Storage to Google Cloud Platform

Red Hat and Google launched a major partnership today with the announcement of a Red Hat Gluster offering on Google Cloud Platform, which extends the open source distributed storage platform to the hybrid cloud.

Alongside Ceph, Gluster Storage is a leading open source scale-out storage platform. It’s a network-based, software-defined file system designed for flexibility and scalability.

Red Hat already offered an on-premise Gluster solution based on its enterprise Linux operating system. Now, the partnership with Google Cloud Platform allows organizations to migrate their existing Red Hat Gluster infrastructure in part or in full to the cloud. In addition, it provides an easier way of deploying Gluster for enterprises that don’t want to maintain it on-premise.

Red Hat is also pitching the extreme scalability that users can obtain by leveraging Gluster in the cloud. “Aggregating multiple Google Persistent Disks, Red Hat Gluster Storage can create a single, more secure and highly available storage pool that can scale to petabytes of data in minutes without disruption,” the company says.

And for those worried about data privacy and security compliance, Red Hat is keen to point out that this is a “shared-nothing” storage solution. That may not be quite the same as a fully on-premise platform, but it seems a fair trade-off for organizations that want the flexibility of cloud-based scale-out storage without the security risks that sometimes accompany the public cloud.