SUSE Enterprise Storage 3 brings Ceph support

SUSE has announced the release and availability of SUSE Enterprise Storage 3, a software-defined storage management solution.

“Bringing Ceph storage innovation to market first — enterprise ready and fully supported—makes our customers more agile and able to take advantage of rapidly emerging innovation in their own enterprises,” said Michael Miller, president of strategy, alliances and marketing at SUSE. “SUSE Enterprise Storage 3 lets them transform their storage infrastructure with the ability to seamlessly adapt new technologies using cost-efficient, resilient and redundant storage infrastructures on commodity hardware.”

SUSE has also partnered with HPE to offer HPE’s Scalable Object Storage Solution with SUSE Enterprise Storage. It is supported on HPE storage-optimized Apollo servers and HPE general-purpose ProLiant servers. The combined solution is aimed at those customers who want a software-defined storage solution that ishighly scalable, resilient and cost effective.

“When the Orchard Park Police Department made a significant investment in body cameras to increase the safety of our officers and citizens, technology to manage the information was a major concern,” said Mark F. Pacholec, chief of police at the Orchard Park (New York) Police Department in a statement.

“We obviously needed to upgrade our storage capacity to manage the growing pool of data. Cost was a concern, and the solution needed to be easy to implement, stable and scalable. After reviewing proposals from several major vendors, it wasn’t even close. SUSE Enterprise Storage running on HPE hardware provides the value, security and stability we need to effectively serve our many constituents,” explained, R. Paul Warriner, network coordinator in the Orchard Park Information Technology Department.

SUSE Enterprise Storage is based on Red Hat technology!

Back in 2014, Red Hat acquired Inktank, the company behind the distributed object store and file system Ceph. Red Hat kept it open source and created a Ceph Community Advisory Board that included members from competitors like Canonical and SUSE. Now SUSE has become the first company to offer a commercial software-defined storage management solution that is based on the Jewel release of Ceph.

Ceph is the most commonly used storage solution for OpenStack deployment, and by basing SUSE Enterprise Storage on Ceph, SUSE brings some of the most powerful features of Ceph to its storage portfolio. It’s now extensively scalable from storage appliance to low cost cloud solutions. On top of that users can now benefit from functionality such as self-healing and self-managing.

With the release of SUSE Enterprise Storage 3, SUSE is also providing customers with early access to many enhancements to the products. The POSIX compliant Ceph filesystem (CephFS) adds native filesystem access, so customers now have unified block, object and file access in their SUSE Enterprise Storage cluster.

SUSE said in a press release that “Multisite object replication provides asynchronous active/active multi-cluster environment to ensure replication at distance for improved disaster recovery, along with truly long-distance replication for block using asynchronous block (RDB) mirroring.”

There is a new framework that makes it easier for customers to simplify management through an advanced GUI management tool (using openATTIC), as well as orchestration of the cluster using Salt.

SUSE Enterprise Storage 3 is available immediately to customers.