Brother from another: SUSE releases software-defined Ceph

The other Linux distro, SUSE, has made good its Ceph promise.

Ceph is an open source, unified, scale-out block, object store and file system, and is used for big data workloads. It competes with Gluster and IBM's proprietary GPFS and is thought to be the most popular open source distributed storage software.

Red Hat has made inroads into the world of Cephdom by buying InkTank for $175m in April last year and bolstering its ability to support Ceph customers.

SUSE now wants a piece of this market and has released its Ceph product as SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES), which is based on the Firefly version of Ceph. Customers build out an infrastructure of commodity servers and disk drives on which to run said SES.

SUSE reckons enterprises can escape proprietary hardware and software storage lock-in by using its SES get-out-of-lock-in-jail card to get "functionality comparable to mid- and high-end storage products but at a fraction of the cost.”

That's a canned quote from Nils Brauckmann, president and general manager of SUSE.

Its feature list includes cache tiering, thin provisioning, copy-on-write cloning and erasure coding.

SUSE Ceph is now generally available, as an option with SUSE OpenStack Cloud or as a stand-alone storage, for 0.1 cent per GB per month. ®