Red Hat today announced the launch of the Red Hat Storage 2.0 beta, building on the company's recent entrance to the storage market.
The software offering focuses on the management of unstructured data and, whilst only in beta at present, brings a number of updates from earlier iterations.
Red Hat claimed it had received "significant interest" in storage products to deal with the 'massive growth of unstructured data' being experienced by businesses.
The move into storage was made possible for Red Hat following its $136 million deal to buy Gluster in October last year, with Storage 2.0 based on the acquired technologies.
Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL6) the firm's Linux-based operating system the storage offering will go up against other open source competitors, including Ubuntu, which launched its own Metal-as-a-Service product last week.
The first update brings together both file and object storage, to create a "centralised storage pool" rather than users having to go to multiple storage locations to analyse data separately. Second is the integration with Apache Hadoop, the most popular big data download according to Jaspersoft's February index, which increases the speed of file access and again brings in more Hadoop deployments to one central location.
There are also improvements to the speed of rebalancing, a new version of its Network File System (Version 3) and the compatibility of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation, allowing users to deploy Red Hat Storage 2.0 as a storage layer in their virtualised environments.
There is even what Red Hat calls "proactive self-healing" to make the software more reliable for important workloads.
Red Hat launched their first storage software appliance back in December 2011 and claimed it had received "significant interest" in storage products to deal with the "massive growth of unstructured data" being experienced by businesses.
A statement from the firm claimed this latest release "built upon Red Hat's industry-leading capabilities for managing the storage of unstructured data" and provided flexibility and affordability for enterprises facing increasing pressure on their storage.
The beta is available now but Red Hat has yet to reveal well a full version will be made commercially available.
So, will Red Hat ever be a big storage player or is this release just plugging gaps in the company's portfolio?
Bob Tarzey, principal analyst at Quocirca, told IT Pro the firm needed a good storage offering to compete with its rivals.
"Storage 2.0 certainly shows [Red Hat] is taking storage seriously," he said. "This is a storage software appliance that ensures RHEL is well integrated with the storage resources it needs to access."
"As Red Hat will see Oracle, Microsoft [and] IBM's software portfolios as the main competitive offerings, it too needs to have a full software stack to remain in the game. That is the way the industry has been going for the last few years for better or worse."
