Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced new storage innovations designed to enable developers to more easily provision and manage enterprise-grade persistent storage for stateful applications running in Linux containers. Today's announcement represents the next step in Red Hat's efforts to transform how enterprise applications are built, deployed and managed with containers for greater business agility. 

The container-native storage capability, available this summer, is integrated with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (formerly OpenShift Enterprise) to deploy applications and storage in a converged manner where storage is served from containers. This can eliminate the need to have an independent storage cluster, enabling customers to achieve greater efficiency, cost savings, and storage for production-ready container environments.

This functionality enables a streamlined end-to-end experience for enterprises using container infrastructure and application development technologies from Red Hat. The integration of Red Hat Gluster Storage with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform offers customers a single point of support for containers, helping to address a key pain point for enterprises in this emerging ecosystem.

Traditionally, applications and storage have been managed through different processes and by separate teams. However, this approach can be inefficient and cumbersome. Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1.3 is designed to address that challenge, enabling developers to control both storage and application containers using a single control plane with Kubernetes in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. This innovation helps Red Hat strengthen the technology stack for containers, enabling greater DevOps integration and automation, from development environments to on-premise and cloud production environments.

Red Hat Gluster 3.1.3 also offers other performance and stability improvements, including faster self-healing and high performance software-defined storage fabric for virtual machines.