SUSE Enterprise Storage 3 is here!

As a young man (in days long past) I worked as an entry-level developer at a large software company. Down the hall from my office sat a wise, gray neck-bearded man; The experienced old developer. The one we all listened to and revered. One day, as we were talking about some software release or another (that detail is lost to time), he looked me square in the eyes – his piercing gaze not unlike staring into the expanse of the universe – and he said the following…

“Always wait for version 3.”

In the software world, this proves true with great regularity. There is, so often, something magical about the third major release of a project – the “3.0”. Even if a piece of software is great, right from the very first release, that third version can be a moment when things really… click. When it all comes together. Maybe it’s that the software has had time to bake, mature and be used for a while “in the real world”. Maybe it’s something to do with the stars.

Whatever the reason, 3.0 is important. 3.0 is exciting.

And, today, SUSE is announcing the release of SUSE Enterprise Storage… version 3.

This is the very first commercially supported, Software Defined Storage management solution to be based on the latest Jewel release of Ceph – the Open Source distributed storage project.

What is Software Defined Storage? So glad you asked! This video does a rather splendid (and speedy) job of explaining the idea:

There’s also early access to some pretty fantastic new features in SUSE Enterprise Storage 3. Here’s a quick run-down of some of my favorites:

• The Ceph filesystem (CephFS) – This POSIX-compliant filesystem uses a Ceph Storage Cluster to store its data. Meaning you now have unified block, object and file access in your SUSE Enterprise Storage cluster.
• Truly long distance replication for block using asynchronous block (RDB) mirroring.
• Multi-site Object Replication – Providing asynchronous multi-cluster environment to ensure replication at distance for improved disaster recovery.
• New framework that will provide a future advanced graphical user interface management tool (using openATTIC) as well as orchestration of the cluster using Salt.

If you’re curious what people who are using SUSE Enterprise Storage think of it, turn your gaze to this short video: