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As an IT manager at an enterprise company, you\u2019ve done the research and become convinced that software-defined storage (SDS) is the only storage approach that can handle today\u2019s data explosion. And now you\u2019re faced with helping decide which SDS solution is right for your company.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a good time to stop and ask, \u201cWhat is the value of making the switch to this particular vendor, rather than its competitor X?\u201d The only right answer is that the vendor has more experience and offers more services and capabilities than the others\u2014to alleviate the IT burden and help you accomplish more without hiring more staff.<\/p>\n
Suppose you\u2019ve decided to go with open source. You could get the free version of Ceph, today\u2019s most popular open source distributed storage solution. Free is hard to beat in up-front value, but then the real challenge is finding out whether your team can manage and maintain the solution without any structured support or built-in integration to your existing infrastructure. That no-cost solution can quickly become extremely expensive in the time and effort you spend to run it.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, there\u2019s SUSE Enterprise Storage. Based on the same popular Ceph technology, it comes with all the powerful capabilities of the free open source solution but also includes a wealth of built-in enterprise support and features that simplify and streamline operation and management for your IT team.<\/p>\n
SUSE Enterprise Storage delivers a highly scalable and resilient storage environment with a single unified SDS cluster that provides applications with object, block and file system storage capabilities. With its distributed storage cluster, it offers unlimited scalability to accommodate hundreds of terabytes to petabytes and beyond.<\/p>\n
Its self-healing and self-managing features can keep applications available and performing after hardware failures by automatically rearranging resources as needed to optimize system performance. Consider this: a good rule of thumb for conventional block storage is that it requires around one storage admin per 500 TB of data. Because a Ceph cluster manages itself, a Ceph storage admin can easily administer as much as 3-4 PB of data. Productivity improves and your team is freed up for projects that help build the business.<\/p>\n
Another interesting money-saving feature of SUSE Enterprise Storage is its per-node pricing model, versus the typical per-gigabyte pricing. Now you don\u2019t have to request more budget for adding more data or using larger nodes or drives.<\/p>\n
Thanks to our early adoption of SDS and leadership in the industry, SUSE continues to improve SUSE Enterprise Storage to meet evolving storage requirements. We are committed to making it faster, easier and even more manageable with every release. Today, SUSE Enterprise Storage 5.5 incorporates numerous performance and stability enhancements including Ceph BlueStore, a new native backend that increases performance by a factor of two or more. Enhancements to ease of use and management, further reducing costs, and increasing operational efficiencies through OpenStack integration and openATTIC enhancements (Note: openATTIC concepts and technology provide the basis for a new default management and monitoring dashboard for Ceph Mimic). Also included is production support for CIFS\/Samba and industry first support for heterogeneous Ceph deployments \u2013 Non SUSE RBD and CephFS Clients. Security has been enhanced with embedded support of AppArmor. AppArmor or \u201cApplication Armor\u201d is a Linux kernel security module that will allow the storage administrator to granularly select the actions that can be made within the Ceph Cluster. There is extensive support for localization and translation of documentation. And technology previews include System Event notifications through email and text, and Enhanced data protection and disaster recovery capabilities with the support for asynchronous iSCSI replication.<\/p>\n
One of the most convincing arguments for any vendor or solution is to see how your peers and competitors are using it to their advantage. One New York-based police department<\/a> used SUSE Enterprise Storage to significantly increase public safety because the super-scalable solution could accommodate huge data streams from new body cameras. Credit-services guru Experian<\/a> kept control of its rapid spike in data volumes with SUSE Enterprise Storage and saw a dramatic increase in system performance. Also, an IT services provider<\/a> and an arts-oriented school in the Netherlands<\/a> both used our SDS solution to manage their growing data stores while lowering their total cost of ownership.<\/p>\n