Red Hat launches storage appliance for Amazon's cloud

Red Hat has announced the Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS), which can take advantage of Amazon's cloud while at the same time offering excellent performance, the company said on Tuesday.

"Essentially what we are providing is network-attached storage in the cloud," said Tom Trainer, storage product marketing manager at Red Hat.

The Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS is a software implementation on Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and EBS (Elastic Block Storage) that enables a network-attached file server to run directly in the cloud. That, in turn, allows enterprises to move all applications that can use NAS storage into the cloud without any modifications, according to Trainer.

Data is striped across multiple EBS volumes to improve performance, according to Trainer. That reduces latency and helps overcome some of the historic performance issues with Amazon's cloud, he said.
The appliance comes in the shape of an AMI (Amazon Machine Image), and supports NFS and CIFS for Windows access, as well as HTTP and Parallel NFS (pNFS).

Today, it is geared for unstructured file data, including content distribution. The appliance is based on Gluster's virtual storage appliance, a company and product that Red Hat acquired in October last year in order to boost its cloud offerings.

Red Hat has made smaller modifications, including changing CentOS for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, according to Trainer.

Availability is a very important aspect of any storage system, irrespective of if its based in an enterprise's own data center or in the cloud. Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services can do synchronous replication in one AWS region and multiple availability zones, according to Trainer.
Availability zones are engineered to be insulated from failures in other zones that are located in the same region.

The appliance can also handle asynchronous replication between different regions, Trainer said.
To build a system with high availability, a user can deploy a number of appliances in different availability zones, and have two copies of the data in the same region. Then the data is also replicated to a different region for disaster recovery.

The appliance costs $7,500 per node with premium support. In addition to that, enterprises also have to pay for their use of Amazon's cloud.

Intel, Samsung Back New Linux Mobile Platform

Two Linux software groups have joined forces, to develop a new operating system for cellphones and other devices in an effort led by Intel and Samsung Electronics .

Under the deal, the LiMo Foundation and Linux Foundation are effectively merging their LiMo and Meego mobile operating systems and hope to gain wider industry and consumer support, but analysts said the new Tizen platform is likely to struggle.

It would have to attract wide support from developers and manufacturers to compete with the dozen or so other mobile operating systems available in a smartphone market currently dominated by Apple's in-house software and Google's Linux-based Android.

"The best hope for them is that big operators get worried by Android ... and decide to consciously switch their allegiances to rival platforms to restrict Google's huge influence over the mobile market," said analyst Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics.

Earlier this year Nokia , the biggest phone maker by volume, ditched its own Symbian operating system this year in favour of Microsoft's Windows Phone software.

Currently Windows Phone has a smartphone market share of 2-3 percent, according to industry analysts, and LiMo and Meego have less than 1 percent apiece, while Android's share is almost 50 percent and still growing.

"This (Tizen) is driven by necessity. Linux rivals to Android have failed to gain traction and Samsung needs to reduce its dependence on Google," said Geoff Blaber, an analyst at London-based telecoms industry consultancy CCS Insight.

The world's second-biggest cellphone maker behind Nokia , Samsung is the leading user of the Android platform, which has been one of the reasons for its escalating court-room fight over patents with Apple.
Also, some other makers of Android-operated phones have begun to look at alternatives since Google agreed to buy Motorola Mobility last month for $12.5 billion.

"Samsung might be further tempted to try a new system as Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility raised uncertainty over the future of Android," said Song Jong-ho, an analyst at Daewoo Securities.
A spokesman for Samsung said: "We've been a core Linux partner ... and this is in line with our strategy of supporting many platforms."