RALEIGH, USA: Red Hat Inc. announced the availability of the Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA), scale-out NAS offering for the public cloud, for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

It is built on Gluster technology that the company acquired in October 2011.

Also Read: Amazon rolls-out Virtual Private Cloud on AWS

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance enables organizations to extend data centre storage to the cloud, says a release.

With the appliance, users have the ability to aggregate both Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, creating an available virtualized storage pool that offers enhanced scalability and performance in the cloud.

"This release of Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services provides users with the highly available storage solutions necessary for a successful cloud deployment," said Ranga Rangachari, general manager, Storage at Red Hat. "By using the appliance within the AWS environment, users are now able to scale linearly for performance and capacity, connect multiple AWS instances to a single shared storage pool, and also experience the benefits of an AWS deployment. In the near future, we expect the appliance to also support additional cloud providers and extend its benefits to their deployments."

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS features both synchronous and asynchronous file replication, assuring data availability across AWS Availability Zones, adds the release.

Synchronous replication provides users with redundancy and protection within a single data centre or multiple data centres and availability zones in a region, while asynchronous geo-replication offers data availability across all AWS Regions.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance is POSIX compliant meaning that no application modifications are required for data access in the cloud, adds the release.

Each VSA pools multiple EBS storage elements together, moving beyond capacity limitations of a single device and smoothing performance variations across the pool.