Intel and SUSE Deliver High Performance Storage that’s Low Cost and Easy to Manage

SUSECON is in full swing, and we’re excited that our partner Intel has joined us as a Platinum sponsor to talk to customers about the innovations that SUSE and Intel are working on together around high performance computing, cloud computing, and storage. One area that I’d like to highlight here is our joint work with Intel to bring Intel Cache Acceleration Software, Intel® Data Center (DC) SSDs and SUSE Enterprise Storage together for businesses with lots of data who are looking for a higher performance, lower cost storage solution.

In November of 2016 SUSE released SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 with some major leaps forward in functionality, quality and stability. SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 allows businesses to reduce capital and operational costs for their storage infrastructure with a truly unified block, object and files solution with production ready Ceph filesystem (CephFS) adding native filesystem access. Businesses with bulk, compliance, backup, archive and large data storage requirements have used SUSE Enterprise Storage to reduce their enterprise storage costs by as much as 50%.

But as demands on storage increase, the bottleneck in storage I/O performance has become a real challenge for many of these businesses. Data on big, slow spinning drives may be cost effective, but all that data is treated equally, even though some data is hotter than others. What they need is an intelligent way to access just the hot data at a reasonable cost. This is where Intel’s Cache Acceleration Software (CAS) comes to the rescue. Intel CAS prioritizes the hot data on super-fast SSDs, and keeps cold data on the slower drives.

Intel CAS and SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 are deployed together at the Centre for Heart Lung Innovation (HLI) at the University of British Columbia. HLI uses the best available technology to image and measure changes in molecules, cells, tissues, organs and whole organisms, including patients, in order to understand the link between our genes and the environment in causing heart, lung, and blood vessel diseases. Research data at HLI is growing more than 25% per year, and is spawning challenges around increasing capital cost, maintenance and upgrades. Instead of doing a forklift upgrade of their existing traditional storage array they wanted a solution that was easy to manage and grow, while maintaining or improving on the existing level of user SLAs while keeping costs down. The result of this collaborative effort utilizing SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 with Intel Data Center SSDs and Intel CAS led to a high performance architecture that exceeded their customer SLAs by taking advantage of Intel and SUSE technologies.

And, to make the consumption of Intel CAS easier for our joint customers, Intel will provide Intel CAS through the SUSE Solid Driver Program providing the assurance that SUSE technology and Intel CAS technology have been thoroughly tested together and are fully supported.

Moving forward, Intel and SUSE are working on Intel CAS interoperability with SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 and further enhancing the performance of Ceph BlueStore functionality. SUSE Enterprise Storage 5, based on the Ceph Luminous release, broadens the scope and use cases for the SUSE Software Defined Storage solution. The new “BlueStore” enablement – an entirely new object storage backend – utilizes block devices directly, doubling write performance for most workloads.

Want to know more about how SUSE Enterprise Storage and Intel CAS work together? Here’s what you should do:

• Take a look at the joint whitepaper describing breakthrough performance with SUSE Enterprise Storage, Intel Cache Acceleration Software and Intel Data
  Center SSDs
• Come to our joint SUSECON session with Intel, UBC and SUSE
• Drop us an email at certifications@suse.com.