Network Attached Storage

Today's technology has evolved to a point so as to meet consumer needs almost perfectly. A lot of this evolution has been geared toward facilitating media creation and consumption — this also holds true for enterprise use. Meanwhile, media quality continues to improve; 1080p may be top quality today, but display manufacturers are beginning to push beyond that. Obviously, a core challenge of these factors is the sheer scale of storage needed by media-serving applications as well as the extreme performance demands required for consistent access times and low latency.

In searching for solutions to these challenges, many organizations are choosing to deploy Red Hat (News - Alert) Storage Server in lieu of costly proprietary storage arrays.

The Red Hat Storage Server family is an open source, scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) and object storage software solution designed to work seamlessly with standard x86 servers. Obviously, the Storage Server family features the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, which offers freedom of choice in terms of deploying cost-effective, highly available storage without compromising scale or performance. Furthermore, Red Hat Storage Server can be deployed on-premise, in private or public cloud infrastructures, or in hybrid cloud environments.

Key features of Red Hat Storage Server for media-specific scenarios include: elasticity, petabyte scalability, high performance, compatibility with industry standards (POSIX, CIFS, NFS and HTTP), unified file/object access, and reliability. These features translate into a number of important benefits, including reduced costs, complexity and downtime as well as increased agility.

Red Hat has pointed out the advantages of NAS before, citing its easy deployment, cost effectiveness and reliability. As an example, the company stated that renewable energy operators use the Red Hat NAS product to manage business-critical weather prediction data.

Meanwhile, the open source nature of Red Hat's solutions, though it may make some IT managers nervous, allows it to match and even surpass the capabilities of competing solutions.

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