Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance For RightScale Cloud Management Platform

RS 1107-1 Gluster - 640 W. California Ave. Suite 200, Sunnyvale, CA 94086 - 1.800.805.5215 - www.gluster.com

Technical Overview The Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance for RightScale packages GlusterFS, a

scale-out Network Attached Storage (NAS) file system in a RightScale

ServerTemplate enabling deployment of high availability, shared storage in

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environments. A key advantage of

ServerTemplates lies in its ability to deploy “cloud-ready” servers. These

servers know how to operate in the cloud – i.e. how to obtain an IP

address, how to access and manage storage, how to gather and store

monitoring data, and how to communicate with other servers in a cloud

deployment.

The Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance is a software-only storage solution

delivered as a virtual appliance. This powerful storage appliance provides a

scalable, virtualized and centrally managed pool of storage for RightScale

customers. The Gluster ServerTemplate is the only way to easily manage

and assure highly available storage within Amazon Web Services (AWS)

public cloud. Synchronous N-way replication across AWS Availability Zones

assures information access within an AWS Region. Asynchronous Geo-

Replication provides continuous data replication and assures information

access across AWS Regions.

The Virtual Storage Appliance for RightScale is deployed as a

ServerTemplate in the RightScale Cloud Management Platform. The

Gluster ServerTemplate simplifies the task of managing unstructured file

data whether you have a few terabytes of storage or multiple petabytes.

As enterprises struggle with both the explosive growth of unstructured

data and the accelerating virtualization of the computing environment,

Gluster and RightScale provide a combined storage and resource

management solution ideally suited for cloud computing and storage.

The Gluster ServerTemplate offers a high availability (HA) storage solution

for Amazon Web Services (AWS). This capability is enabled by the

Synchronous N-way replications and Asynchronous Geo-Replication of files

built into the Gluster ServerTemplate. At the core of the Gluster

ServerTemplate is the GlusterFS file system.

Deploying Gluster

Gluster ServerTemplates are optimized for cloud environments. They are

easily deployed and scaled on public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web

Services and aggregates block storage into a single pool that can be shared

across many clients. Gluster ServerTemplates are POSIX-compliant so the

interface abstracts, cloud vendor APIs and applications do not need to be

modified.

Figure 1. Gluster ServerTemplate within the

RightScale Cloud Management Platform

Key Benefits

Automate management with

RightScale Cloud Management

Platform

Manage private and public clouds from

a single interface

The only high availability solution for

Amazon EBS

Uses array of EBS devices for

consistent, high performance access

Elastically scale storage with no

downtime or application interruption

Deploys in minutes in Amazon EC2

environments

Easy backups to S3 – full support for

EBS snapshots

Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance For RightScale Cloud Management Platform

RS 1107-1 Gluster - 640 W. California Ave. Suite 200, Sunnyvale, CA 94086 - 1.800.805.5215 - www.gluster.com

Additional Features

Optimized for RightScale and Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Gluster ServerTemplates are managed by RightScale

Management Dashboard.

A POSIX-compliant, distributed file system, designed

for the cloud. No need to rewrite your applications.

Pools multiple EBS devices to deliver consistent, high

performance access.

High Availability

Synchronous N-way replication assures information

availability across AWS Availability Zones.

Asynchronous Geo-Replication assures information

availability across AWS Regions.

Scalability

Elastic volume management enables storage volumes

to be abstracted from the hardware so data and

hardware can be managed separately.

Storage servers can be added or removed while data

continues to be available, with no application

interruption. Volumes can grow or shrink across

machines in the system and can be migrated within the

system to rebalance capacity or add/remove systems

on-the-fly.

A unified global namespace aggregates disk and

memory resources into a single pool, virtualizing the

underlying hardware. Grow and shrink the single

namespace dynamically, with no interruption to client

access.

Flexibility

Runs in userspace, eliminating the need for complex

kernel patches or dependencies.

Easy to Deploy and Manage

Build a highly available, secure, low cost, and easily

managed, multi-tenant scale-out storage system in

minutes, add additional instances in seconds.

With just a few mouse clicks you can deploy additional

instances in seconds.

Provision and scale-out an unlimited number of

storage servers for multi-petabyte NFS, CIFS, and

GlusterFS mounts.

Gluster Top: Provides visibility into the I/O workload

pattern.

Gluster Profile: Provides performance statistics over a

user-defined time period for metrics including latency

and amount of data read or written.

Files can be replicated two or more times to ensure

data is always available, even in the event of hardware

failure. Self-healing capabilities restore data to the

correct state following recovery.

Superior Economics

Enables a more cost effective use of the AWS storage

hardware environment.

Ideal for RightScale usage-based pricing model – pay as

you go.

Try/Buy

To learn more about a functional trial or to purchase

the ServerTemplate please contact sales@gluster.com.