So remember last month when we announced updates to Red Hat Gluster Storage? Well, we made good: Those updates are here in v3.1.

New features to leverage

Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1 offers a host of new features you can leverage, including:

Erasure coding

Tiering

Bit-rot detection

Active/active NFSv4

Enhanced security

This version also includes enhancements to address the data-protection and storage-management challenges confronting users of unstructured and big data storage.

Erasure coding: Delivering data protection

Erasure coding is an advanced data-protection mechanism that can lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) as it reduces the need for RAID. An alternative to RAID, erasure coding reconstructs corrupted or lost data by using information about the data that’s stored elsewhere in the system. Erasure coding provides failure protection beyond just single/double component failure and consumes less space than replication.

Tiering: Streamlining data management

Tiering, now in Tech Preview, offsets the computational expense of moving data between tiers of hot and cold storage, Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1 automatically assigns or reassigns data a “temperature” based on the frequency of access and promotes or demotes data in a volume so different sub-volume types act as hot and cold tiers. An “attach” operation in the solution converts an existing volume to a “cold” tier in a volume and creates a new “hot” tier in the same volume. The result is one “tiered” volume—thus the feature’s name.

Bit-rot detection: Enhancing data integrity

Bit-rot detection enhances end-to-end data integrity by scanning data periodically to detect the data corruption that arises from silent failures in underlying storage media. Without this feature, the performance and integrity of stored data would slowly deteriorate and eventually severely degrade storage system performance.

Active/active NFSv4: Boosting security and resilience

By supporting active/active NFSv4 via the NFS ganesha project, Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1 allows users to export Gluster volumes through NFSv4.0 and NFSv3 via NFS Ganesha. A user space implementation of the NFS protocol, NFS Ganesha is very flexible, with simplified failover and failback in case of a node/network failure. The high availability implementation

(that supports up to 16 nodes of active-active NFS heads) uses the corosync and pacemaker infrastructure. Each node has a floating IP address that fails-over to a configured surviving node in case of failure. Failback happens when the failed node comes back online.

Enhanced security: Spanning deployments

Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1 enhances security via:

Support for SELinux in enforcing mode and SSL-based network encryption, increasing security across the deployment

Support for active NFSv4, based on the NFS Ganesha project, to provide performance and secure data access through clustered NFSv4 endpoints

SMB 3 capabilities, adding protocol negotiation, copy-data offload, and in-flight data encryption to allow for efficient file transfer and secure access in Microsoft Window environments

More features to anticipate

In addition to these features, there’s another thing to note now that Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1 is generally available. In August, we plan to announce the availability of the product’s RHEL 7-based features. Right now, Red Hat Gluster 3.1 is based on RHEL 6.

The chance to see for yourself

So there’s more to come all the time with Red Hat Gluster Storage. But yearning for more in the meantime? Click here for product details.