Committing to an SDS Solution That Delivers the Most Business Value

Choosing the right software-defined storage (SDS) solution for your business can’t be a snap decision—your choice will affect the way you manage data and how your organization grows for many years to come. It’s critical to ask some hard questions; namely, what is the value of undergoing a switch to this vendor’s SDS solution versus going with the other guys?

As the IT director of an enterprise company, you likely have a paramount priority in making the selection: getting the best ROI. And that objective relies on two factors: dependability of the supplier and reliability of the solution.

Our dependability drives your success

There are a lot of SDS solutions out there—but not all of them have a handle on what an enterprise needs. One option, for instance, is a free version of Ceph, today’s most popular open source distributed storage solution. It’s certainly an attractive price point at first glance, but you’ll end up spending a lot of additional time and money if you don’t have the DIY skills or highly specialized knowledge to solve all your own issues .

Your supplier should have a solid understanding of enterprise storage challenges and the ways organizations are managing the current explosion of business data. The real measure of a Ceph solution is the vendor’s capacity for enterprise support, as well as their investment in integration, certification, and management tools.

As the first supplier to bring Ceph-based (SDS) storage to virtually any operating system, SUSE is an industry leader in SDS solutions—which means we are also established, dependable and committed to enhancing SUSE Enterprise Storage as SDS technology evolves. When we first began offering SUSE Enterprise Storage, Ralf Flaxa, SUSE’s vice president of engineering at the time, said,

“SUSE’s leadership as the first to provide heterogeneous OS support is an indicator of our commitment to solving issues customers actually face. … SUSE Enterprise Storage provides the best of the Ceph project, tested and supported for enterprise customers.”[1]

Solution reliability boosts ROI, too

You look for a dependable SDS supplier because its solutions will be reliable—which also plays a big part in ROI. The more you can rely on your solution to make storage easier and more efficient, the better your overall ROI.

Our early adoption of SDS solutions means we’ve had more time to refine and improve SUSE Enterprise Storage. Powered by Ceph technology, SUSE Enterprise Storage is extensively scalable from storage appliance to cost-effective cloud solution. With each release, we’ve broadened its scope and use cases, and today it is the ideal solution for simplifying compliance and scaling the storage of archive, backup and large data file applications without limitations.

Enhanced ROI through savings of time and money

SUSE Enterprise Storage streamlines storage to reduce management and operational costs. You can realize significant CAPEX savings by using commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives that are at least 30 percent less expensive than average-capacity-optimized NAS solutions and at least 50 percent less expensive than average-capacity-optimized mid-range disk arrays.[2] SUSE Enterprise Storage helps you avoid vendor lock-in so you can choose the most economic hardware and maintain flexibility to repurpose if business priorities change.

The solution also makes it easy for your enterprise to adapt to changing business and data demands by automatically optimizing, upgrading or adding storage when you need it, without disruption. And it helps reduce downtime and keep performance high with self-managing and self-healing capabilities that automatically respond to fluctuating storage demands.

With less expensive components and easier, more automatic management, SUSE’s SDS solution delivers an excellent ROI with big savings in IT time and costs of management and maintenance. With better storage for less time and money, your enterprise can free up resources toward accelerating innovation and building the business in ways to keep it competitive for a long time.

[1] “SUSE Enterprise Storage 2 First to Bring Ceph-Based Storage to Any OS,” SUSE press release, November 3, 2015.

[2] “SUSE Enterprise Storage 3,” SUSE media presentation