Kathy Gibson at SUSEcon, Prague – Cloud, big data and Internet of Things are all contributing to a data explosion in the enterprise – and traditional storage systems are simply unable to manage the load while providing acceptable performance levels.

Software-defined storage (SDS), where enterprise storage hardware and software are decoupled, is the logical next step in the move to a software-defined data centre.

Done right, SDS should offer enterprises a highly scalable solution that reduces storage capex and opex costs, while offering simple, robust and flexible functionality.

Now, SUSE offers customers more flexibility and choice, helping them to meet their growing storage needs more securely and cost-effectively using industry-standard hardware and open source-based software-defined storage solutions.

The company will today announce SUSE Enterprise Storage 5, an intelligent software-defined storage management solution that offers customers enhanced ease of management, improved performance and expanded features including new disk-to-disk backup capabilities.

“Every generation of enterprise infrastructure innovation is now being built on open source,” says Gerald Pfeifer, vice-president: products and technology programs at SUSE.

“SUSE is expert at both contributing to and using upstream innovation to create enterprise-grade, secure solutions that can be combined with other technologies to best address customer needs. This approach applied to software-defined storage delivers highly scalable solutions that radically reduce storage costs in terms of both capital and operations expense.”

SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 is based on the Luminous release of the Ceph open source project, and it is suited for compliance, archive, backup and large data storage.

Large data applications include video surveillance, CCTV, online presence and training, streaming media, X-rays, seismic processing, genomic mapping, and computer-assisted design.

Backup and archive applications include Veritas NetBackup, Commvault and Micro Focus Data Protector, along with compliance solutions such as iTernity.

SUSE Enterprise Storage5is the first commercial offering to support the new BlueStore backend within Ceph. This follows SUSE’s first-to-market support for iSCSI and CephFS in previous versions of SUSE Enterprise Storage.

Customer benefits of this release include:

* The ability to service environments that require higher levels of performance through the new BlueStore native object storage backend. SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 offers up to double the write performance of previous releases, coupled with significant reductions in I/O latency.

* The ability to free up capacity and reduce data footprint via BlueStore-enabled data compression.

* Increased disk space efficiency of a fault-tolerant solution through enablement of erasure coding for replicated block devices and CephFS data.

* Lowered operational cost with an expanded advanced graphical user interface for simplified management using the next generation openATTIC open source storage management system.

* Simplified cluster management and orchestration through enhanced Salt integration.

* Production support of the Network File System (NFS) Gateway exporting CephFS and enabling users on a client computer to access files over a computer network.

* Production support for the Network File System (NFS) Gateway exporting the RADOS object gateway (RGW) and enabling legacy file applications that need a filesystem interface to access cloud native Amazon S3 or Swift data.

* A technical preview of Ceph’s ability to export a file system to CIFS/Samba for heterogeneous connectivity.

SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 offers an efficient and flexible disk-to-disk backup solution that is scalable, self-managing, fault tolerant, always on and easy to upgrade.

Inexpensive industry-standard hardware running open source software lets customers avoid the high prices and vendor lock-in of proprietary solutions, while SUSE Enterprise Storage has with an innovative licensing model that avoids per-gigabyte storage costs.

Advanced backup software provides deduplication services and SUSE certified with enterprise backup software vendors Commvault and Veritas.