Earlier today, you may have read the news about container-native storage for OpenShift Container Platform, which helps developers manage storage just as easily as applications. As the name suggests, storage and applications are served out of containers running on the same server. Red Hat Gluster Storage runs in a container inside OpenShift, just like another application, but instead it serves storage. This helps lower costs and increase control and flexibility. Even better, it enables customers to move applications between platforms (on-premise, virtual, cloud, containers) without needing to rewrite code to deal with different storage environments.

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What's the big deal?

Containers are the next big thing. There’s a good chance you're thinking about, planning, or already transitioning your applications to containers. While the container revolution started primarily with stateless applications, the reality is that most enterprise applications running in containers need a persistent storage layer to store application data, state, and configuration, all of which need to live beyond the life of a container. Our engineers have delivered a continuum of innovation by containerizing Red Hat Gluster Storage itself, and also leveraging API-driven volume allocation to help easily manage and provision storage for containers. Simply put, Red Hat Gluster Storage solves the persistent storage challenge for containers.

Why Red Hat?

Today’s storage news is aligned to the announcement outlining Red Hat’s strategy to offer the OpenShift platform from development to cloud platforms. Container-native storage strengthens the Red Hat value proposition for containers, while also increasing the appeal of Red Hat solutions to developers. In the words of Scott Sinclair, Senior Storage Analyst at ESG: “Any integration of storage into the container host and application development platform goes a long way to alleviating resistance in container adoption.”

In addition, this capability comes backed by Red Hat’s world-class support, offering a single point of support for customers looking for a comprehensive solution for their container environments.

To containers and beyond!

Red Hat Gluster Storage has made huge leaps in terms of adding enterprise-grade storage features over the last 3 to 4 years. Significant enhancements to scalability, reliability, performance, and security features have helped it surpass traditional storage solutions in terms of price/performance. Now, all this enterprise-class functionality is available for containerized applications.

Red Hat Gluster Storage is flexible, it's easy to set up and use, and it's one of the few storage solutions in the marketplace that can span classic, mode 1 customers to all-in, mode 2 customers and everything in between. Follow our story at Red Hat Summit this week.