SuSE storage spins-up Ceph
Open source software platform company SuSE has announced SUSE Enterprise Storage 6, a software-defined storage solution powered by Ceph technology.
Many would argue that storage on its own is snorage (i.e. enough to send you to sleep), but software -defined storage does at least drive us forward into the realm of the software developer.
By way of a reminder, software -defined storage is a way of managing data storage resources and functionality that is essentially uncoupled from (i.e. has no underlying physical dependencies) the actual hardware resources that offer up the amount of storage being used.
Software-defined storage is even more typified and characterised (than by its hardware dependency decoupling factor) by its ability to be upgraded independently of the hardware that it sits upon — just the kind of control factor that software engineers love.
Ceph on the other hand (yeah we know, it sounds like encephalitis brain inflammation, which may be a deliberate joke on behalf of the engineers who built it) is a free-software storage platform that implements object storage on a single distributed computer cluster and provides interfaces for object-, block- and file-level storage
Another theory suggests that Ceph is called Ceph because it’s short for a cephalopod, as in octopi. “The many tentacles of the octopus are supposed to represent the parallelism of Ceph. Ceph came out of UCSC, whose mascot is Sammy the Slug. Slugs and cephalopod are both part of mollusca phylum,” writes Avylove here, on the Red Hat Community pages.
SuSE Storage
Sorry… wasn’t this story about SuSE Enterprise Storage?
Yes it was, but we like backgrounders, etymology and appropriate level of contextualised exposition before we get to the main course here – okay?
SuSE says its new offering enables IT organisations to adapt to changing business demands with lower operational expense through new features focused on containerised and cloud workload support, improved integration with public cloud and enhanced data protection capabilities.
“We work with the community to develop innovative open source technology that we then test and harden to ensure it is enterprise ready. We aim to transform enterprise storage infrastructure with a truly open and unified, intelligent software-defined storage solution that reduces costs and alleviates proprietary hardware lock-in for customers. SUSE Enterprise Storage 6 reflects SUSE’s ongoing commitment to making Ceph ‘enterprise consumable’ [everywhere],” said Brent Schroeder, CTO Americas for SuSE.
The University of Maine is using SUSE Enterprise Storage to support an HPC landscape underpinning a number of research programmes.
Based on the Ceph Nautilus release, SUSE Enterprise Storage 6 is being positioned as a technology which will maximising application availability with faster and more granular backups that can now use low-cost public cloud resources for better data protection.
It also helps them reduce operational IT expense by optimising data placement with the ability to automatically move data between tiers of storage based on policy, ensuring access to critical data when customers need it. SuSE has more here.
Full octopus version of logo