Red Hat Gluster Storage 3 (formerly Red Hat Storage Server 3): Supported and Recommended Workloads

Overview

This article describes the workloads that are best suited for Red Hat Gluster Storage (formerly Red Hat Storage Server).

Environment

• Red Hat Gluster Storage 3
• Red Hat Gluster Storage for On-premise

Best Fit and Optimal Workloads

Red Hat Gluster Storage offers an open software-defined storage solution for reliable and cost-effective storage of unstructured file based data. It is highly reliable and provides optimum performance for deployments that typically involve the following use case:

• Container Storage for OpenShift via the Container-Native storage product.
• Digital multi-media (video, audio, pictures) serving (e.g., content delivery networks, online radio)
• Live virtual machine image store for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
• Large File & Object Store (using either NFS, SMB or FUSE client)
• Active archiving and near-line storage
• Backup target for Commvault Simpana
• Shared storage for ActiveMQ
• Shared storage for Tibco EMS
• Enterprise NAS dropbox & object Store / Cloud Storage for service providers
• Transactional database workloads in RHGS+RHEV environment where RHGS is the back-end store for VMs.
• Persistent storage for containers in an OpenShift environment
• Cold Storage for Splunk Analytics Workloads
• ownCloud File Sync n' Share

Workloads to Avoid

Red Hat Gluster Storage is not recommended to be used for workloads that are

• Write-mostly and involve a lot of contention
• Involves creating and deleting lots of directories/folders frequently

Unsupported workloads

• RHGS as backend for VMWare for storing live VM image (VMDKs) (even though NFS is supported by RHGS)
• DB workload on standalone RHGS

Related Knowledgebase Articles

See also this KBase for exceptions, unsupported workloads, and the architecture review process Red Hat Gluster Storage 3 (formerly Red Hat Storage Server 3): Architecture Review Process