Chapter 2. What Changed in this Release?

Heketi provides a RESTful management interface for managing Red Hat Gluster Storage volume life cycles. This interface allows cloud services like OpenStack Manila, Kubernetes, and OpenShift to dynamically provision Red Hat Gluster Storage volumes. For details about this technology preview, see the Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1 Administration Guide: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Storage/3.1/html/Administration_Guide/ch06s02.html.

Red Hat Gluster Storage now provides the ability to automatically classify and migrate files based on how frequently those files are accessed. This allows frequently accessed files to be migrated to higher performing disks (the hot tier), and rarely accessed files to be stored on disks with lower performance (the cold tier). This enables faster response times, reduced latency, greater storage efficiency, and reduced deployment and operating costs. For more information about tiering, see the Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1 Administration Guide: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Storage/3.1/html/Administration_Guide/chap-Managing_Data_Tiering.html.

Red Hat Gluster Storage snapshots can now be cloned and made writable by creating a new volume based on an existing snapshot. Clones are space efficient, as the cloned volume and original snapshot share the same logical volume back end, only consuming additional space as the clone diverges from the snapshot. For more information, see the Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1 Administration Guide: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Storage/3.1/html/Administration_Guide/.

As of Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1 Update 2, Red Hat Gluster Storage can now be set up in a container on either Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host 7.2 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 7.2. Containers use the shared kernel concept and use system resources more efficiently than hypervisors. Containers rest on top of a single Linux instance and allow applications to use the same Linux kernel as the system that they are running on. This improves the overall efficiency of the system and reduces space consumption.

The BitRot scrubber command (gluster volume bitrot VOLNAME scrub status) can now display scrub process statistics and list identified corrupted files, allowing administrators to locate and repair corrupted files more easily. See the Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1 Administration Guide for details: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Storage/3.1/html/Administration_Guide/chap-Detecting_Data_Corruption.html.

Red Hat Gluster Storage now supports and enables asynchronous I/O with Samba by default (aio read size = 4096). Asynchronous I/O can enable increased throughput on multi-threaded clients, or when multiple programs access the same share. This improves default performance for most users of Samba and Red Hat Gluster Storage.

Red Hat Gluster Storage Console now provides a virtual appliance that can be used to quickly set up a pre-installed and partially configured Red Hat Gluster Storage Console. This also enables offline installation of the Red Hat Gluster Storage Console on virtual machines managed by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Management. See the Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.1 Console Installation Guide for details: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Storage/3.1/html/Console_Installation_Guide/chap-Red_Hat_Storage_Console_Installation-OVA.html