SUSE transforming storage with containerised and cloud workload support

“SUSE is powering digital transformation with agile open source solutions like SUSE Enterprise Storage that enable enterprises to continually innovate, compete and grow,” said Brent Schroeder, CTO Americas for SUSE. “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.’”

The University of Maine is using SUSE Enterprise Storage to support an HPC landscape underpinning a number of research programmes. Steve Cousins, supercomputer engineer for the University of Maine, said, “SUSE Enterprise Storage has already brought clear improvements to our deep learning projects, one of which requires two million files in a single directory. Putting these files into SUSE Enterprise Storage has increased performance more than 10 times compared with the previous storage solution. Thanks to the stability and ease of management of the SUSE solution, we have significantly reduced the time we spend managing live and archived data. This keeps our internal team free to focus on driving new value for the university and its life-changing research projects.”

Based on the Ceph Nautilus release, SUSE Enterprise Storage 6 allows customers to seamlessly adapt to changing business demands by:

• Accelerating innovation as it further removes storage silos, giving customers easier access to different types of data and enabling them to quickly extract information from data using cutting-edge search and analytics tools.
• Maximising application availability with faster and more granular backups that can now leverage low-cost public cloud resources for improved data protection.
• Responding to changing business demands faster with the ability to quickly and easily leverage public cloud resources as part of their storage infrastructure.

It also helps them reduce operational IT expense by:

• Optimising data placement with the ability to automatically and efficiently move data between all tiers of storage based on policy, ensuring access to critical data when customers need it.
• Improving IT efficiency with a single, scalable storage solution that meets all storage requirements for containerised and cloud-enabled workloads, no matter where they live.

“SUSE’s increased focus on cloud and containers in SUSE Enterprise Storage 6 matches the direction of enterprises today,” said Amita Potnis, research director, Enterprise Infrastructure Practice, IDC. “Organisations are transforming their IT infrastructures to take advantage of cloud technology, even as they grapple with increasing amounts of data that both power and slow innovation today. Software-defined storage from SUSE will ease that transformation by removing obstacles, simplifying cloud integration and empowering rapid innovation to help enterprises meet their own changing business needs.”

Frank Feder, vice president of Sales at Thomas-Krenn.AG, said, “As an independent server manufacturer, Thomas-Krenn started its exciting journey with SUSE software-defined storage solutions as early as 2015 with the world’s first hardware appliance for SUSE Enterprise Storage. The release of SUSE Enterprise Storage 6 takes our partnership to the next level. The technical sales staff of Thomas-Krenn is now completely SUSE certified and ready to meet the high demands of customers, not only for reliable, highly scalable hardware, but also for professional consulting and innovative, individual solutions.”