Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the global availability of Red Hat Storage Server 2.0, the company’s scale-out, open source storage software solution for the management of unstructured data. Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 transforms the enterprise and cloud storage market by – for the first time – combining community-powered innovation with the volume economics of industry standard x86 servers across on-premise, cloud or hybrid environments.

Across industries, the volume of unstructured data – ranging from social media content, text and emails to image, video and audio files – is exploding as a result of digitization, mobility and our increasingly connected world, and dramatically outpacing the growth of structured data. By 2020, the growth of Internet-connected devices and sensors is projected to reach 50 billion, a prediction that supports IDC’s estimate that the total volume of the digital universe – comprised of 90 percent unstructured data and calculated at 1.8 zettabytes in 2011 – will increase by a factor of 50 in 2020. As the volume of unstructured data continues to grow, organizations are facing challenges managing both compute and data, and closed source, proprietary and monolithic hardware storage solutions may not be equipped to help organizations deal with this onslaught in a cost-effective or scalable manner.

Red Hat Storage solutions leverage community-powered innovation to address scale-out storage challenges. Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 is the industry’s first file storage solution to integrate easily with object storage, enabling users to combine larger amounts of storage into a single centralized pool. Unified file and object storage simplifies the management of different kinds of data, giving customers powerful storage and information flexibility, the ability to efficiently scale to meet exploding unstructured data storage demands and enhancing information access options in a more cost-effective manner.

Built on the industry-leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, Red Hat Storage provides freedom of choice by allowing customers to deploy cost-effective, scalable and highly available storage without compromising on scale or performance. Red Hat Storage Server can easily be deployed on-premise, in private clouds, in public cloud infrastructures or hybrid cloud environments and is optimized for storage-intensive enterprise workloads including high-performance computing, near-line archival and rich media content clouds.

Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 also features the following key innovations:

• Expanded choice, offering compatibility with more than 50 dual-socket x86-based servers from industry leaders
• Open and standards-based, Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 features support for industry-leading file access protocols including Common Internet File System (CIFS), Network File System (NFS), HTTP and OpenStack Swift; and
• Control without compromising data accessibility and availability, including geo-replication, equipping Red Hat Storage to handle the most demanding production workloads.

Available only in Technology Preview, Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 is also offering support for big data infrastructure, with compatibility for Apache Hadoop that provides a new storage option for Hadoop deployments. With the ability to install Red Hat Storage in Hadoop environments, either in combination and along with Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), or as a replacement for HDFS, this Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 technology preview enables faster file access and opens up data within Hadoop deployments to other file-based or object-based applications. Also available only in Technology Preview is a management console for Red Hat Storage. Based on the oVirt Project – the open source infrastructure and virtualization management platform – the Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 management console technology preview gives users visibility and control into their storage clusters via a single pane of glass.

Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 is available immediately, and launches with an industry-leading ecosystem, giving users access to a broad selection of storage services.