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A major benefit of Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS, according to Red Hat’s press release, is the ability to aggregate both Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances into one giant virtualized pool of scalable, high-performance storage, at Amazon’s pay-as-you-go storage rates.

To that end, according to Red Hat, the new virtual appliance offers both synchronous and asynchronous replication, keeping data available between, ahem, AWS Availability Zones. The synchronous replication keeps data protected and replicated within a single region, while the asynchronous replication does the same across all AWS Regions. It’s also POSIX-compliant, so applications require no modification to access Red Hat Storage data access.

In addition to the scalability, performance and technical edges, according to Red Hat, the virtual appliance integrates with the on-premises Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, giving enterprises a way to ramp storage from the data center into the cloud, either for overflow situations or as part of a longer-term migration strategy.

Red Hat Storage promises support is coming for other cloud platforms. But on a final note, I couldn’t help but notice that before the acquisition Gluster offered its own AWS virtual appliance for almost exactly a year. Then again, according to Red Hat, Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS is only built on “former Gluster technology,” and presumably the open source titan has done its own brand of tuneup to its predecessor.