Chapter 2. What's New in this Release?

Local Snapshots for disk based backup

Red Hat Storage Server's snapshot feature provides a point-in-time copy of Red Hat Storage volumes that enables file and volume restoration. Snapshots can be taken online. This means the filesystem (and its associated data) continue to be available for your applications and users, while snapshots are being taken. There is almost no impact to the user or applications regardless of the size of the volume when snapshots are taken.

Red Hat Storage Server supports up to 256 snapshots per volume that provides a lot of flexibility on the frequency of backups of your data. A simple and intuitive command line interface for creating, managing and restoring snapshots are included in this release.

Additionally, Red Hat Storage Server supports User Serviceable Snapshots or self service snapshots which is a technology preview feature for this release. This feature allows users other than administrators to recover one of more files in a volume. You can backup the snapshots taken on a Red Hat Storage volume easily to address data protection needs of the modern data center.

Thin-p is the preferred provisioning mode for Red Hat Storage Server 3.0. Thick-p to thin-p migration is supported through documented steps. Red Hat Storage requires the kernel-2.6.32-431.17.1.el6 version or higher to be used on the system. Thick-p support will remain for 2.1.x to 3.0 upgrade scenarios where snapshots are not being used.

Monitoring using Nagios

The Red Hat Storage 3.0 introduces monitoring using Nagios - an open IT infrastructure monitoring framework. You can monitor logical entities and physical resources, get alerts and reports providing a historical record of outages, events, notifications, and also view trending and capacity planning graphs and reports.

The Monitoring functionality based on Nagios and is packaged to work in conjunction with Red Hat Storage Console or can be set up to run in a standalone mode. You can also integrate it with your existing Nagios infrastructure or 3rd party management platforms.

For more information on Monitoring using Nagios, see Monitoring Red Hat Storage chapter in Red Hat Storage Administration Guide and Monitoring Red Hat Storage using Nagios chapter in Red Hat Storage Console Administration Guide.

Hadoop Plug-in

Red Hat Storage 3.0 offers a Hadoop File System plug-in which enables Hadoop Distributions to run on Red Hat Storage. This plug-in is now fully supported. You can now run in-place analytics on data stored in a Red Hat Storage Server without incurring the overhead of preparing and moving data into a file system that is purpose built for running Hadoop workloads.

The Hadoop distribution supported for this release of the storage server is HortonWorks Data Platform (HDP) 2.0.6 which bundles a management tool Apache Ambari 1.4.4. The services supported for Red Hat Storage Server include Pig, Hive, Mahout, Sqoop, Flume, Oozie and Zookeeper.

For more information on Hadoop plug-in, see corresponding section in Red Hat Storage Administration Guide.

Non-disruptive Upgrade

You can perform live upgrade to Red Hat Storage 3 release without incurring a downtime for certain usage scenarios. Users and applications will hardly see any impact while the upgrade process is being executed which will greatly simplify the process of absorbing a new release. The upgrade process will include the requisite instrumentation that are needed to switch from RHN (current entitlement system) to CDN (Red Hat's next generation entitlement management system).

For more information on Non-disruptive Upgrade, see corresponding section in Red Hat Storage Installation Guide.

Logging Enhancements

In Red Hat Storage 3.0, logging capabilities have been expanded to provide additional information for monitoring and troubleshooting Red Hat Storage Server nodes. Red Hat Storage Server has a new logging infrastructure with an online Error Messages guide. This guide includes the following details:

For more information on error messages, see Red Hat Storage Error Message Guide.

CDN based delivery of Red Hat Storage Server

Red Hat Storage Server 3.0 will be delivered via Red Hat's Content Delivery Network (CDN) and subscription management tooling for entitlement management. CDN makes it easier to manage and keep track of product entitlements and subscriptions.

For more information on CDN based delivery of Red Hat Storage Server, see corresponding section in Red Hat Storage Installation Guide.

NFS Ganesha (Technology Preview refresh)

In this release, NFS Ganesha is being refreshed to include a number of significant enhancements and capabilities including dynamic configuration (addition and deletion of exports at run time), NFSv4 ACL's for glusterFS, glusterFS multi volume support, NFSv4 PseudoFS support and NFSv4/v3 kerberos authentication.

60 drives per server

You can now attach up to 60 disk drives to each Red Hat Storage Server (up from 36 disks in the older release) node. This enhances the supported storage capacity available for each subscribed Red Hat Storage server.

Hardware Compatibility

Expanded Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) and support for SSDs for creating Red Hat Storage bricks. You can run Red Hat Storage on more hardware systems than before and use SSDs that is supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux to create bricks for workloads that demand high performance.

For more information onHardware Compatibility, see Hardware Compatibility section in Red Hat Storage Installation Guide.