By Steve Bohac, Red Hat Storage Product and Solution Marketing

Open software-defined storage is transforming the way organizations tackle their data management challenges. We are seeing that more and more customers are realizing that an open software-based approach can create opportunities to significantly reduce costs and efficiently contend with their exploding data landscape. Additionally, open software-defined storage solutions can help discover new roles and value for enterprise storage.

As open software-defined storage continues to proliferate, management is becoming a key component. New capabilities in Red Hat Storage support this open software-defined storage evolution. The Red Hat Storage Console is a purpose-built GUI tool used to provision, administer and provide alerts for storage resources. This Console is now available (at no extra cost to customers) with the latest release of Red Hat Storage Server. The combination of the new Red Hat Storage Console, Red Hat Satellite 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager provides customers a complementary combination to handle their configuration management, provisioning and administration needs.

As the open software-defined storage management stack becomes more feature-rich than basic deployment and configuration tools, it is speculated to one day reach up the entire stack to the enterprise and cloud management suites. As early indicators, there are many management-oriented projects currently incubating in the open source community that we expect to play a role in advancing software-based storage management capabilities : the Gluster Community’s Nagios Monitoring, Gluser-Puppet and Foreman-Gluster projects to name a few.

It's great to see how open, software defined storage continues to evolve, with Red Hat helping to lead the way. Customers are excited and we are too!

To learn more about the Gluster Community’s management projects, visit the Gluster Community Forge. For more information about Red Hat Storage, please visit here.