SUSE Enterprise Storage, powered by Ceph, now available

SUSE has launched SUSE Enterprise Storage, a self-managing, self-healing, distributed software-based storage solution for enterprise customers. It is powered by Ceph, the most popular open source distributed storage solution in the marketplace. Priced at a market-leading 0.1 cent per gigabyte per month, SUSE Enterprise Storage enables organisations to build cost-efficient and highly scalable storage using commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives.

IDC estimates that from 2013 to 2020 the amount of data created and copied annually will grow by a factor of 10 – from 4.4 trillion gigabytes to 44 trillion. The data volume doubles every two years.

“This data growth has created a critical need for reliable yet affordable storage solutions beyond the traditional, expensive proprietary solutions we're used to,” said Nils Brauckmann, president and general manager of SUSE. “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.”

Based on the Firefly version of the Ceph open source project, the fully featured SUSE Enterprise Storage is well suited for object, archival and bulk storage, with features including cache tiering, thin provisioning, copy-on-write cloning and erasure coding.

Laura DuBois, program vice president at IDC, said, “The emerging combination of reliable open source software and commodity hardware has rocked the storage market, to the benefit of storage customers. Lower costs, deployment flexibility and the all-important availability of data are benefits delivered by solutions like SUSE Enterprise Storage.”