Inktank Partners With SUSE

Inktank Storage, Inc. and SUSE LINUX Products GmbH announced a strategic partnership to jointly provide enterprise-grade support for the Ceph‘s Distributed Storage System as part of SUSE Cloud.

Inktank provides enterprise-grade, commercial support for Ceph. With this agreement, it will ensure that SUSE Cloud customers receive the same level of open source support that SUSE has delivered over the past twenty years. And by integrating Ceph with SUSE Cloud, the first OpenStack-powered private cloud solution, SUSE is delivering a reliable, cost-effective distributed storage infrastructure for private clouds.

As companies increasingly move their applications to the cloud, IT organizations are seeking open and flexible cloud solutions that can provide scalable storage to handle their ever-growing data requirements. Both SUSE Cloud and Ceph are based on open source, giving companies the flexibility to use existing infrastructure to design the best cloud deployments for their individual needs. The Future of Storage, Ceph provides cloud storage that is self-healing and self-managing, while autoscaling to accommodate even the demanding enterprise needs. SUSE Cloud simplifies deployment and ongoing administration of physical cloud infrastructure.

Ceph is integrated into the OpenStack project and provides scalable object and block storage for cloud deployments using SUSE Cloud, which is powered by OpenStack. The partnership between Inktank and SUSE makes expert technical support available so SUSE Cloud customers can leverage Ceph for their cloud storage needs. SUSE will provide support for Ceph components directly to all customers of SUSE Cloud. Inktank will provide engineering support to SUSE to ensure resolution of technical issues.

SUSE Cloud automates set-up and management tasks of cloud infrastructure, including Ceph distributed storage environments, by leveraging the Crowbar software framework, an open source project sponsored by Dell. Both Inktank and SUSE are contributors to the Crowbar Project, which helps ensure a joint OpenStack and Ceph solution that can be implemented simply, giving IT organizations maximum flexibility to configure their clouds.

"SUSE Cloud is designed for companies that want to increase agility and reduce costs with private and hybrid cloud solutions. Companies embracing cloud and working with big data need highly scalable and reliable storage. Ceph’s technology meets those demanding requirements," said Michael Miller, VP of global alliances and marketing, SUSE. "Together SUSE and Inktank are helping more companies leverage the power of the open source cloud, and backing that technology with industry leading services and support."

"Ceph’s uniquely scalable architecture makes it ideal for the cloud. That’s why Ceph is being swiftly embraced by the industry and being integrated into the Linux kernel, OpenStack and a growing number of other cloud platforms," said Bryan Bogensberger, president and COO, Inktank. "Inktank is eager to work with SUSE to bring Ceph’s transformational storage capabilities to more customers, while giving them the support they need to get the most out of their cloud investments."

"SUSE and Inktank are actively contributing to Crowbar, an open source software framework developed by Dell and leveraged in Dell OpenStack and Hadoop solutions, to deliver a simple to use and robust provisioning framework," said John Igoe, executive director of cloud and big data solutions, Dell, Inc. "We’re excited that SUSE and Inktank are working with us to extend the capabilities of Crowbar to support the easy deployment of Ceph as part of a SUSE Cloud private cloud environment."