Open Source Suse Enterprise Storage Server 5 Software-Defined Storage

SUSE LLC‘s software-defined storage is giving customers more flexibility and choice than traditional storage appliances.

It allows them to meet their growing storage needs more securely and cost effectively using industry-standard hardware and open source-based software-defined storage solutions.

The company introduced Enterprise Storage 5 with enhanced ease of management, improved performance and expanded features including new disk-to-disk backup capabilities for enterprise customers.

“Every generation of enterprise infrastructure innovation is now being built on open source,” said Gerald Pfeifer, VP, products and technology programs, SUSE. “SUSE is expert at both contributing to and using upstream innovation to create enterprise-grade, secure solutions that can be combined with other technologies to best address customer needs. This approach applied to software-defined storage delivers highly scalable solutions that reduce storage costs in terms of both capital and operations expense.“

Gartner, Inc.’s analysts noted in a recent ‘Cool Vendor’ report: “It has become painfully evident that storage capacity demands, and expectations for far more rapid provisioning of that storage, have far outpaced the ability of [infrastructure and operations] teams’ capabilities. Far-more-automated systems are required to restore a sense of balance, that is, storage solutions that offer much greater scale, but also much more automation.” ^(*)

Enterprise Storage 5
This release of the company’s intelligent software-defined storage management solution, Enterprise Storage 5, will enable IT organizations to accelerate innovation and reduce costs by transforming their enterprise storage infrastructures. It is based on the Luminous release of the Ceph open source project, and it is suited for compliance, archive, backup and large storage. Large data applications include video surveillance, CCTV, online presence and training, streaming media, X-rays, seismic processing, genomic mapping, and computer-assisted design. Backup and archive applications include Veritas NetBackup, Commvault and Micro Focus Data Protector, along with compliance solutions such as iTernity.

Enterprise Storage 5 is a commercial offering to support the BlueStore backend within Ceph. This follows firm’s first-to-market support for iSCSI and CephFS in previous versions of Enterprise Storage.

Customer benefits of this release include:

• The ability to service environments that require higher levels of performance through the BlueStore native object storage backend. Enterprise Storage 5 offers up to double the write performance of previous releases, coupled with significant reductions in I/O latency.

• The ability to free up capacity and reduce data footprint via BlueStore-enabled data compression.

• Increased disk space efficiency of a fault-tolerant solution through enablement of erasure coding for replicated block devices and CephFS data.

• Lowered operational cost with an expanded advanced GUI for simplified management using the next generation openATTIC open source storage management system.

• Simplified cluster management and orchestration through enhanced Salt integration.

• Production support of the NFS Gateway exporting CephFS and enabling users on a client computer to access files over a computer network.

• Production support for the NFS Gateway exporting the RADOS object gateway (RGW) and enabling legacy file applications that need a filesystem interface to access cloud native Amazon S3 or Swift data.

• A technical preview of Ceph’s ability to export a file system to CIFS/Samba for heterogeneous connectivity.

Disk-to-disk backup in Enterprise Storage
Enterprise Storage offers an efficient and flexible disk-to-disk backup solution that is scalable, self managing, fault tolerant, always on and easy to upgrade. It delivers these capabilities without the costs typically associated with high-end functionality. Inexpensive industry-standard hardware running open source software lets customers avoid the high prices and vendor lock-in of proprietary solutions. Enterprise Storage also beats the cost of enterprise open source alternatives as well as commercial offerings with a licensing model that avoids per-gigabyte storage costs.

In addition, the need for a separate deduplication device (a sophisticated device usually associated with proprietary solutions that is designed to reduce the overall storage volume by eliminating duplicated data) is eliminated through advanced backup software that provides deduplication services. The company is certified with providers in enterprise backup software, including Commvault and Veritas, all of which feature built-in deduplication.

In a recent TCO comparison of disk backup solutions, software-defined storage in general and the company specifically came out on top. According to IT Brand Pulse, “The cost data says SUSE is the clear value leader led by best-in-class pricing model which includes support in the software license and, unlike others where license costs are front-loaded, the cost of a software is spread out evenly over the five years.“

Enterprise Server 5 will be available in the 4Q17.

 ^(*) Gartner, Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies, 2017, Dave Russell, Arun Chandrasekaran, Julia Palmer, Raj Bala, Alan Dayley, Pushan Rinnen, Garth Landers, 12 May 2017.