SUSE Enterprise Storage 7 – new horizons

If data is the lifeblood of the modern business, then storage must be its heart. The preservation, safeguarding and management of exponentially growing volumes of data on a budget is one of the biggest business challenges today. Companies require scalable, robust and reliable storage solutions to retain their competitive edge.

At SUSE, we are committed to delivering the best and latest technology to customers, and turn enterprise IT infrastructure into powerful tools that support your business growth and protect your data assets. In line with our focus on innovation and unwavering commitment to helping you succeed now while preparing you for the future, today we announce the highly anticipated release of SUSE Enterprise Storage 7 – one of the first industry products and leading enterprise-grade solutions based on the Ceph Octopus release.

SUSE has been deeply involved in this release. Our engineers led the community development of its two major management modules, cephadm and the new dashboard graphic interface.

SUSE Enterprise Storage 7 lets organizations to take full advantage of the cloud, taking their storage and data management to a new level. It empowers businesses to use data more efficiently to optimize operations, gain customer and market intelligence, and deliver new products and services. It also delivers simple-to-manage, agile and containerized storage with increased speed of delivery and reliability. SUSE customers can accelerate innovation, reduce costs and alleviate proprietary hardware lock-in by transforming their enterprise storage infrastructure with a truly open, unified and intelligent software-defined storage solution.

SUSE Enterprise Storage containerized architecture removes interdependencies between the solution and the underlying operating system, allowing for consistent deployment of the application, regardless of the environment. It also simplifies software management and future updates.

A new management framework, driven by cephadm, replaces all previously used vendor-specific frameworks to deliver a superior user experience. The dashboard is integrated with cephadm, and provides a comprehensive overview of the entire storage cluster, preventing human error and simplifying critical tasks. Say goodbye to managing your cluster from the command line – it is now all done with a push of a button.

To address growing storage demand in the container space, the new cloud-native SUSE Enterprise Storage 7 provides storage to Kubernetes environments. Enterprises will be able to reduce the IT infrastructure footprint and spend by co-locating compute and storage on the Kubernetes cluster.

Last but certainly not least, to address the needs of Windows-based enterprise environments, we are introducing and contributing this first industry-native Ceph block I/O driver to the community. Windows systems will now see a simpler setup and significantly reduced latency due to elimination of the previously required iSCSI gateway.

“Our initial impressions are very positive,” says Johan Carlstedt, a researcher in digital systems and datascience at RISE’s ICE Datacenter. “Compared to previous frameworks, cephadm feels very intuitive. The move to containers makes the entire process much faster. Applying DeepSea stages takes a lot of time. In contrast, applying a change to the cluster with cephadm feels very snappy. It feels easy to keep track of the cluster configuration with the declarative YAML files. In general, we are looking forward to upgrading to SUSE Enterprise Storage 7.”

Visit www.suse.com/storage for more information on how SUSE Enterprise Storage 7 can help you protect, manage and optimize the lifeblood of your business.