Red Hat (RHT) is building on its presence on Amazon (AMZN) Web Services with the introduction of Red Hat Storage Test Drives on AWS. The offering provides existing and potential enterprise customers with a taste of what Red Hat Storage Server can offer them.

The open source software company noted that Red Hat Storage Server running on AWS infrastructure provides customers with an open software-defined storage platform that is highly scalable. Additionally, it gives enterprises unified file and object access.

The Red Hat storage team described it like this: "A unified POSIX file and object storage solution makes it possible for enterprises to leverage cloud storage without rewriting their existing applications, while also allowing cloud and mobility applications to access the same data through an object interface based on OpenStack Object Storage (Swift)."

Storage Server is available through a pre-integrated, pre-verified and ready-to-run Amazon Machine Image that will provide quick deployment of secure, cloud-based storage on AWS. According to Red Hat, it also will be able to scale fairly well on demand, with petabytes of capacity available.

The end goal, at least as far as customers are concerned, is to increase time-to-value and easing the deployment of cloud storage. Although Storage Server on AWS is a public cloud offering, Red Hat is also taking into account most enterprises are interested in a hybrid cloud scenario.

Enterprises interested can check it out for free using the new Red Hat Storage Test Drive offering, which provides them with up to five hours of AWS server time. According to Red Hat, enterprises can create and experience a secure, multi-terabyte storage offering within minutes.

Don't jump too quick, though. Red Hat Storage Test Drive won't be available until later this month. When it does go live on AWS, though, enterprises will be able to register to check it out.