SUSE launches its own open source storage solution

SUSE has released its own storage solution for enterprise customers. The open source storage is powered by Ceph’s Firefly open source project and the solution is highly scalable.

Nils Brauckmann, GM, SUSE, said that SUSE Enterprise Storage is a highly scalable and resilient software storage solution that lets small organisations and enterprises move from proprietary, hardware based storage to software based storage, which ensures great functionality at negligible cost.

SUSE has designed this software based storage solution with easy back-up and archiving capabilities for enterprise customers. It has priced this solution well— charging $0.001 per GB for enterprise users. SUSE’s vision has been to bring cost-efficient and highly scalable storage solutions to enterprises. The companies can build their storage space using commodity off-the-self servers and disk drives.

Enterprise customers can save a lot of the money being spent on expensive hardware with this solution. SUSE claims that this software based storage solution is 30 per cent less expensive than conventional NAS solutions and 50 per cent less expensive than average capacity optimised disk array systems. SUSE has designed this solution to be very flexible and scalable to serve an enterprise’s need for more storage as the company grows. Customers can rapidly boot new virtual machines with SUSE Enterprise Storage. The service offers fault-tolerant enterprise disk storage.

SUSE has invested in OpenStack in the past so the company has no intentions of competing with it. Red Hat already has its own software based storage solution, so SUSE needed a cloud based storage solution to help serve the needs of its customers. It has integrated this new storage solution in SUSE OpenStack Cloud to provide flexible access. SUSE Enterprise Storage can also be used as a stand-alone storage solution.