SUSE Goes Distributed Storage | SUSE Communities

SUSE Goes Distributed Storage

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In his SUSECon keynote this morning Nils Brauckmann broke the news: SUSE is entering the distributed storage market.

This is something we have been working on for a while. When we launched SUSE Cloud 1.0 in August last year we already included Ceph RADOS as a technology preview.

And indeed, tackling distributed storage is a very natural step for SUSE.

Why?

First, customers are asking for scale-out storage that delivers the high performance and resilience they need at a price point they can afford. In fact, more than one customer approached us about acquiring SUSE Cloud just for the sake of using the Ceph components there.

Second, Ceph is an excellent choice of technology. It provides a distributed object store (RADOS), block storage (RADOS Block Device, RBD) and a POSIX-compatible distributed file system, all designed to run on off-the-shelf hardware, using local storage to form a redundant cluster of storage nodes. Ceph is massively scalable and enables customers to automatically and cost-effectively grow from terabytes to exabytes and beyond. Ceph is self-healing and self-managing and has no single point of failure. It is fully Open Source, part of the Linux kernel and features a thriving community.

Third, it plays to our strengths. As the creator of Enterprise Linux, storage always has been one of SUSE’s strong points. Think of us providing XFS for a decade, pushing Btrfs as the new gold standard of Linux file systems, our success with clustered storage as part of our High Availability product, or the fact that many high end storage racks from various vendors are powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Last but not least, it makes business sense. According to IDC, the worldwide file- and object-based storage market continues to gain momentum with revenues exceeding $23 billion in 2013. This is driven by the explosion of data (Big Data, anyone?) and the fast rise of cloud computing.

As a software-based solution Ceph provides the flexibility and versatility that customers are looking for. It is a technology with high appeal to the Linux community, integrated with the OpenStack platform, and available as part of SUSE Cloud. A SUSE storage product based on Ceph, maintained and supported by SUSE, is a natural extension of our enterprise and cloud product offerings.

What do you think?

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Gerald Pfeifer Dr. Gerald Pfeifer is CTO at SUSE and chair of the board of the openSUSE project. Previously vice president of Products at SUSE, he has been contributing to open source before that term was coined and enjoys building bridges between business, technology and communities.