Adapt to Changing Data Demands with SUSE Enterprise Storage 3 – and Rely on the New Documentation for Its Deployment and Administration!

As businesses evolve in today’s hi-tech business world, coping with the sheer volume and growth of data is proving to be a significant challenge. The capital outlays required for extra storage capacity often exceed an IT organization’s budgets. Managing all this extra capacity is proving too much for storage administrators to handle without additional head count, which in turn pushes up operational costs. More and more organizations need a storage solution that is both highly scalable and that radically changes general storage costs. It also has to be simple, robust, flexible, and deliver industry-leading functionality.

We have good news for you! SUSE just last week announced its latest intelligent software-defined storage management solution, SUSE Enterprise Storage 3, which is the first commercially supported solution based on the Jewel release of the Ceph open source project. This ensures our customers are first to get supported and easy access to the rapidly advancing Ceph community innovation.

SUSE Enterprise Storage is an open source solution tightly integrated with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. It is designed as a distributed storage cluster to provide virtually unlimited scalability from terabytes to petabytes. It is self-managing and self-healing. It continuously monitors data utilization and re-balances data placement. This means it can optimize system performance without the need for teams of administrators to constantly monitor and manage the storage.

As a software-defined storage solution, SUSE Enterprise Storage is built on off-the-shelf commodity server and storage hardware, with all of the advanced functionality being provided by open source software. This makes it possible to keep up with the relentless growth of storage requirements while maintaining close control of IT budgets.

To make it easy for you to implement and maintain your SUSE Enterprise Storage environment, the documentation team – thanks to the tireless work of my colleague Tomáš Bažant – just released the new SUSE Enterprise Storage Deployment and Administration Guide.

This guide helps you understand the concept of the SUSE Enterprise Storage with a main focus on managing and administrating the Ceph infrastructure. It also demonstrates how to use Ceph with other related solutions, such as OpenStack or KVM. What´s more, many chapters in this manual contain links to additional information resources available on the system itself or on the Internet.

The new documentation guides you through all relevant Ceph installation steps and cluster management tasks. This includes the description of a basic Ceph cluster structure and the related terminology. The guide also introduces steps to integrate Ceph with virtualization solutions such as libvirt, Xen, or KVM, and ways to access objects stored in the cluster via iSCSI and RADOS gateways.

A real highlight is the Best Practice chapter which provides you with more than 40 pages of practical tips, tricks and hints, so  that you can quickly find a solution or more information to a specific problem. The topics are sorted by easy-to-understand categories and cover the following areas:

• Reporting software problems by using the supportconfig utility
• Questions and answers regarding hardware recommendations
• Various installation methods, for example installation via the utilities ceph-deploy and ceph-disk
• Monitoring options, such as Calamari, a Web front-end for managing and monitoring the cluster, which provides for graphical representation of the cluster’s usage
• Adding or removing disks, also on a live cluster, to avoid downtime
• Trouble shooting and recovery tips
• Managing S3 and Swift users, as well as quotas
• Performance tuning and diagnosis
• Integration of KVM, libvirt or XEN disk images and Mounting and how to mount/unmounts an RBD Image
• Specific questions around the maintenance of your Ceph Cluster
• Server related maintenance tasks, such as adding or removing a server from the cluster.
• NTP, firewall and private network settings

Now we hope that you will enjoy the reading of the new SUSE Enterprise Storage Guide, and that you will find it helpful for your daily work.

As always, we would like to encourage you to provide your feedback for the documentation you’ve read. We appreciate any comment about or suggestion for the new SUSE Enterprise Storage Guide or any related piece of documentation. Don’t be shy: just send your ideas to doc-team@suse.com – or use the existing feedback and commenting tools for the online documentation.