SUSE Enterprise Storage

What is SUSE Enterprise Storage?

SUSE Enterprise Storage is an intelligent software-defined storage management solution, powered by Ceph technology, that enables IT to transform their enterprise storage infrastructure to seamlessly adapt to changing business and data demands by delivering cost-efficient, highly scalable and resilient storage using commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives.

What are the benefits of CephFS?

The Ceph file system provides numerous benefits:

• It provides stronger data safety for mission-critical applications.
• It provides virtually unlimited storage to file systems. Ideal for “Large Data” file storage.
• Applications that use file systems can use CephFS with POSIX semantics. No integration or customization is required.
• Ceph automatically balances the file system to deliver maximum performance.

Why base SUSE Enterprise Storage on Ceph?

Ceph is the most popular OpenStack distributed storage solution. It is extensively scalable from storage appliance to cost-effective cloud solution. As of the Jewel release, Ceph provides industry-leading storage functionality such as unified block, object and file storage, thin provisioning, erasure coding and cache tiering. It is self-healing and self-managing.

Does SUSE Enterprise Storage Support iSCSI?

Yes, support for the iSCSI storage protocol allows non-Enterprise Linux Servers (Linux, UNIX, Windows) to access block storage made available from the SUSE Enterprise Storage Cluster to provide a true heterogeneous solution.

How is SUSE Enterprise Storage different from Ceph?

SUSE Enterprise Storage customers will gain confidence that the enterprise storage solutions they deploy are tightly integrated with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. This has a long history of delivering leading data storage functionality to enterprise customers. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was first to provide a journaling file system with XFS, followed by first-to-market support for EXT3 and ReiserFS. It was also the first to support a clustered file system with OCFS2. And, most recently, it is the first to market with support for the scalable, copy-on-write, B-tree file system BtrFS. SUSE also has over 2 decades of experience delivering the data integrity enterprise customers demand.

What is in SUSE Enterprise Storage 4?

SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 based on the Jewel release of Ceph includes many new and updated features as well as a number of technology previews that accelerate innovation including multi-protocol block, object and filesystem data access capabilities, multisite object replication and asynchronous block mirroring, a new management framework as well as, a number of enhancements focused on performance and stability improvements. This release includes new production ready features and a number of Technology Previews:

New for 4:

Production ready Ceph filesystem (CephFS) adds native filesystem access. Customers can now deploy a truly unified block, object and file solution with SUSE Enterprise Storage, further reducing the capital and operation costs of their storage infrastructure.

Added 64-bit ARM support brings hardware platform choice for software-defined storage to enterprise and hyper-scale customers.

A new framework using the openATTIC open source storage management system that provides an advanced graphical user interface for simplified management, bringing even greater cost efficiencies and simplicity.

Long-distance replication for block storage and multisite object storage replication for enhanced data protection and improved disaster recovery.

Enhanced cluster orchestration using Salt for simplified storage cluster management.

Customers get early access to NFS features such as NFS Ganesha support and NFS access to S3 buckets.

How does SUSE Enterprise Storage help you?

SUSE Enterprise Storage is a software-defined storage (SDS) solution that helps you deliver cost-efficient, highly scalable and resilient storage to the business. SDS is a paradigm shift from the traditional storage model where customers bought proprietary, expensive and purpose-built storage systems. Using SUSE Enterprise Storage, you are able to:

• Modernize your data center using cost-efficient and open solutions to reduce costs.
• Increase business agility with the capability to quickly add new storage without disruption, enabling IT to seamlessly adapt to changing business and data demand.
• Reduce business risk with a highly redundant and resilient storage infrastructure designed with no single points of failure, reducing downtime and ensuring availability of business critical application data.

SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 truly unify enterprise storage requirements with SUSE Enterprise Storage 4, the first production release of CephFS. Enabling customers to run production workloads for Block, Object and File storage within a single cluster, further reducing capital and operation costs.

SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 includes openATTIC. What actually is it?

openATTIC is an open source storage management system for Linux-based appliances that had been tightly integrated with SUSE Enterprise Storage 4. openATTIC provides the configuration, management, and monitoring of storage resources via a wide range of file and block storage protocols as well as the Ceph distributed storage system. openATTIC is based on well-established open source technologies and provides a RESTful API for automation/integration and an intuitive web-based interface making it a powerful solution for managing SUSE Enterprise Clusters and other storage resources.

What is CephFS and how does it work?

With CephFS, SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 provides a traditional file system interface with POSIX semantics. Object storage systems are a significant innovation, but they complement rather than replace traditional file systems. As storage requirements grow for legacy applications, organizations can configure their legacy applications to use the Ceph file system too! This means customers can run one storage cluster for object, block and file-based data storage.

Why SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 and “Large Data” File Storage?

Enterprises need a cost-effective and scalable platform to store “large data” like video, graphics, audio and more, where traditional storage servers get consumed faster and cost more, and are unsuitable to handle 100s GB/TB size data well.

SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 is engineered to handle large data using an object storage foundation (RADOS) and cloud principles of distributed computing on inexpensive, commodity servers.

SUSE Enterprise Storage offers “Per node” pricing vs industry-norm “capacity based pricing” which means your customer’s costs stay low even as they store more data.

SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 provides the ability to extend into block and file storage as needed.

SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 is ideally matched for applications such as oil and gas seismic maps, medical (x-rays, mammography, CT, MRI, 3D ultrasound), video streaming, video surveillance, CAD/CAE, and much more

With the addition of CephFS and OpenAttic has the pricing for SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 changed?

No, pricing remains the same:

Base Configuration - $10000 (Priority Subscription)

SES and limited use of SLES to provide:

• 4 SES storage OSD nodes (1-2 sockets)
• 6 SES infrastructure nodes

Expansion Node - $2300 (Priority Subscription)

SES and limited use of SLES to provide:

• 1 SES storage OSD node (1-2 sockets)
• 1 SES infrastructure node

Are there any recommended minimum cluster configurations for SUSE Enterprise Storage 4?

Yes, we have minimum cluster configuration requirements for both trial/POC clusters and production clusters. Please review minimum configs for more details.