Red Hat Storage 2.0 Beta Features Hadoop Support

Red Hat has announced a beta version of Red Hat Storage 2.0, which is the second version of the company's integrated storage appliance. Red Hat Storage is software only, scale-out storage that is said to provide flexible and affordable unstructured data storage for the enterprise. "Red Hat Storage 2.0 provides new opportunities to unify data storage and infrastructures, increase performance and improve availability and manageability in order to meet a broader set of an organisation’s storage challenges and needs," the company said in a release.

The beta of Red Hat Storage 2.0 includes the following features:
* Unified File and Object Access: Red Hat Storage 2.0 provides the industry’s first release of file storage designed to integrate with object storage. It thus provides organisations with greater information accessibility, within a single, centralised storage pool;
* Big Data Storage Infrastructure: Red Hat Storage 2.0 includes compatibility for Apache Hadoop providing a new storage option for Hadoop deployments. This new functionality, enables faster file access and opens up data within Hadoop deployments to other file-based or object-based applications;
* Built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Red Hat Storage 2.0 is built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to offer a secure and flexible enterprise class operating environment. The appliance uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux's extended update support capabilities and the XFS file system (Red Hat's Scalable File System Add-On) to provide a core operating base platform which is reliable, scalable, secure and stable over an extended duration of time;
* Performance Enhancements: Faster rebalancing, performance tuning enhancements and Network File System Version 3 (NFSv3) performance optimisation;
* Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation: readiness, enabling organisations to use Red Hat Storage as a storage layer for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation;
* Improved Manageability: New capabilities that make it even easier to manage a Red Hat Storage cluster, including enhanced data management with Network Lock Manager (NLM) compliance, new event history information availability, additional storage brick level information, and improved visibility into self-healing operations and status; and
* Improved Reliability: New capabilities, such as proactive self-healing, that make Red Hat Storage even more reliable and ready for an organisation’s most demanding production workloads.
Red Hat Storage 1.0 was launched in December 2011.