Suse launches Ceph-based cloud software-defined storage

Open-source software provider Suse has announced the availability of Suse Enterprise Storage. The product is a commercially-supported distribution of Ceph.

Suse Enterprise Storage is based on the Firefly release of Ceph and includes features such as caching and tiering, Thin Provisioning, copy-on-write replication and erasure coding.

Ceph is an open-source storage platform that provides object storage, as well as block and file access to OpenStack and other cloud environments.

It is aimed at customers that want to build public and private cloud environments. While it offers block and file access, it is based on object storage and is more likely to be used in cloud use cases where access times are less critical than they would be with, for example, transactional processing.

It is designed to be deployed in a grid-like fashion, with no single point of failure, and can scale to exabytes. It uses RESTful gateways to expose the object storage layer to Amazon S3 and OpenStack cloud environments.

As a storage software – or software-defined storage – product it allows organisations to build storage infrastructure using commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives.

The storage market is dominated by suppliers that sell hardware bundled with their own controller software and operating systems (OS). Software-only products aim to break that link by offering storage software that can be deployed on commodity servers with standard disk drives, cutting costs in the process.

Suse will price Suse Enterprise Storage at 0.1 cent per gigabyte per month. It is available as an option with Suse OpenStack Cloud or as a standalone product. 

Nils Brauckmann, president and general manager of Suse, said: “Suse Enterprise Storage is a highly scalable and resilient software-based storage solution that allows enterprises to move away from proprietary, hardware-centric storage solutions to software-based storage that delivers functionality comparable to mid- and high-end storage products but at a fraction of the cost.”