The Role of IT in the Cloud Era
In a sign of how rapidly hybrid cloud computing is evolving inside enterprise IT organizations, Red Hat today announced an alliance with Google under which the Red Hat Gluster Storage software will become available on the Google Cloud Platform.
Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager for Red Hat Storage and Big Data, says the alliance with Google is the latest in a series of agreements between Red Hat and a number of cloud service providers intended to make it simpler to store data on premise and off using a common storage framework.
Red Hat, for example, last year inked a wide ranging cloud alliance with Microsoft, and Gluster is already available on Amazon Web Services. This Gluster initiative further extends an existing set of cloud relationships Red Hat already has in place with Google.
In addition to being able to scale out to the cloud more easily using a distributed Gluster file system, Rangachari says IT organizations need to be able to invoke public clouds based on their performance attributes in specific geographic regions. That becomes a lot easier to accomplish when the same file system is being used across all those public clouds, says Rangachari.
Rangachari notes that it also becomes simpler to asynchronously replicate files in and out of the cloud or even between public clouds when a common file system is shared across them.
At this juncture, cloud computing is almost by definition now hybrid. The challenge facing IT organizations is making those public clouds a natural extension of their existing IT environments.
