SUSE Acquiring openATTIC Storage Management Assets

As part of its growth strategy, SUSE LLC acquired software-defined storage management assets from German IT firm it-novum GmbH, including openATTIC, the open source Ceph and storage management framework.

The acquisition allows SUSE to accelerate its use of openATTIC as the management framework for SUSE Enterprise Storage and will help the company deliver simpler, more cost-effective enterprise storage management solutions.

As part of the transaction, a team of skilled open source engineers from it-novum has joined SUSE.

“Acquiring openATTIC from it-novum perfectly aligns with SUSE’s open source strategy – providing software-defined infrastructure solutions for enterprises requiring powerful management capabilities,” said Nils Brauckmann, CEO, SUSE. “This transaction is also another tangible indication of SUSE’s increasing momentum. For the first time, our business is expanding through both organic growth and technology acquisition. The storage revolution is underway, and enterprise-grade storage management is essential for customers that will continue to have a mix of storage technologies for many years to come.”

Earlier this year, the two companies began developing additional Ceph management functionality for openATTIC, which is becoming the management framework for SUSE Enterprise Storage. Powered by Ceph technology, SUSE Enterprise Storage is a self-managing, self-healing, distributed software-based storage solution for enterprise customers.

Michael Kienle, CEO of it-novum, said: “SUSE’s commitment to open source is second to none in the industry, which makes this transaction a logical step for both our companies. We take our commitment to the openATTIC project, customers and engineers very seriously, and we know all are in good hands with SUSE.”

This news continues SUSE’s upward market trajectory, including SUSE’s recent announcement regarding growth of its parent company and expansion of a key SUSE industry alliance.

openATTIC Project
The transaction also transfers sponsorship of the openATTIC open source project from it-novum to SUSE. Similar to SUSE’s sponsorship of the openSUSE Linux project, the project will remain open and available for broad community engagement.

“It is a great honor for us to become an official part of the SUSE family,” said Lenz Grimmer, engineering team lead, openATTIC project. “This transition confirms that the changes we implemented in the project over the last year were steps in the right direction and helped to foster and grow the community and ecosystem around openATTIC. We look forward to working more closely with the SUSE Enterprise Storage team and the entire SUSE engineering organization. It allows us to tap into the deep expertise and experience of SUSE’s engineers to further improve and extend openATTIC’s Ceph and storage management capabilities. We remain committed to the inclusive and open development process that we’ve established and are very excited about the new opportunities that will arise through this transaction.”

About it-novum
it-novum with its HQs in Fulda, Germany, and branch offices in Berlin, Germany, and Vienna,  is  a business open source specialist and founder of the open source Ceph and storage management software openATTIC and the system management project openITCOCKPIT. openATTIC is an open solution for managing storage resources and has been designed for the deployment in cloud systems, such as OpenStack. openITCOCKPIT is based either on Nagios, Naemon or Icinga and has become a monitoring standard in large and medium-sized enterprises. it-novum is a pioneer when it comes to open source solutions in the areas of business-related and business-critical applications. As a certified business partner of SAP and partner of a number of open source projects, firm’s approach is to provide the integration of closed and open source business applications at an enterprise. Company’s offers open source-based solutions in areas such as service management (help desk and ticketing systems based on OTRS and i-doit), content and document management (portals, collaboration, detection and control of content based on Alfresco and Liferay) and business intelligence (reporting, analysis, data integration based on Pentaho and Jedox Palo, Hadoop). it-novum is a daughter of KAP AG (sales 2014: €387.5 million). Founded in 2001, it-novum was the former IT department of KAP AG.

Additional perspective on this acquisition and what it means for SUSE and its customers