SUSE Launches Ceph-Powered Software Defined Storage update from February 2015

After launching a beta version late last year at SUSECon 2014, SUSE has released SUSE Enterprise Storage, which it describes as self-managing, self-healing, distributed software-based storage solution for enterprise customers. It leverages commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives, and is powered by the Ceph open source storage model.

SUSE is best known for its popular enterprise distribution of Linux. It also has a distribution of the popular open source cloud architecture OpenStack. SES will be available as an option with SUSE OpenStack Cloud or as a stand-alone storage solution.

Billed as Petabyte-scale storage, Ceph is an extremely popular open source scale-out block, object store and file system for big data workloads. Almost a year ago Ceph open storage systems provider Inktank went for $175 million to Red Hat.

SUSE notes that its SES offering is best suited for object, archival and bulk storage, with features including cache tiering, thin provisioning, copy-on-write cloning, and erasure coding.

SES is software defined storage that is aimed and public and private cloud environments with large and demanding big data needs.

SUSE is also taking on the entrenched proprietary storage systems installed with claims that its offering saves 50 percent over the average capacity-optimized mid-range storage array. The company claims that its software defined storage alternative will cost $0.01 per gigabyte per month.

Software defined storage running on commodity servers is a hot space. Also today, a software defined storage startup called Springpath came out of stealth with a $34 million funding round. The company was founded by VMware veterans.

IBM has also pushed the software defined storage angle recently, releasing its Spectrum Accelerate offering based on its XIV storage system, but also available to run on SoftLayer Infrastructure-as-a-Service.

"The emerging combination of reliable open source software and commodity hardware has rocked the storage market, to the benefit of storage customers," Laura DuBois, program vice president at IDC, said in a statement. "Lower costs, deployment flexibility, and the all-important availability of data are benefits delivered by solutions like SUSE Enterprise Storage."