Amazon gets Red Hat storage appliance

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 offers excellent performance, the company said on Tuesday, PC World reports.

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

With the appliance, users have the ability to aggregate both Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, creating a highly available virtualised storage pool that offers enhanced scalability and performance in the cloud, Computer Technology Review writes.

This news comes on the heels of Red Hat's announcement of its Storage Software Appliance, in December 2011. These two products provide greater flexibility to organisations looking to include file storage in their on-premise and cloud strategies.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS features both synchronous and asynchronous file replication, assuring data availability across AWS Availability Zones. Synchronous replication provides users with redundancy and protection within a single data centre or multiple data centres and availability zones in a region, while asynchronous geo-replication offers data availability across all AWS regions.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance is POSIX compliant, meaning that no application modifications are required for data access in the cloud.

Basically, users can use this appliance to create a space that can either serve as a large pool of resources to access frequently, or as a cloud storage space for data overflow, ZDNet notes.