Suse Storage

White Paper: Storage

Suse Storage is a software defined storage (SDS) technology.

2020: SUSE Enterprise Storage 7

On November 13, 2020, SUSE announced the release of the SUSE Enterprise Storage 7 enterprise storage solution. This is one of the first commercial distributions created on the basis of the release of the open source storage area network system Ceph - Octopus.

As SUSE emphasizes, when creating a distribution in the company, they were guided by the desire to help turn the corporate IT infrastructure into a powerful tool that supports business growth and protects enterprise information resources.

Data is the vitality of a modern enterprise, and the repository can be called its heart. Preserving, protecting, and managing exponentially growing data sets without going beyond budget is one of the most important challenges facing organizations. Scalable, stable, reliable storage solutions are required by enterprises to gain competitive advantage.

SUSE actively participated in the creation of the Ceph release - the company's engineers led the development of its two key components, the cephadm administration module and the interactive dashboard integrated with it.

According to the company, SUSE Enterprise Storage 7 allows organizations to take storage and data management to a qualitatively new level, taking advantage of all the features of cloud technologies. The solution allows you to more efficiently use the available data to optimize operations, analyze the customer and the market, prepare new products and services, add to SUSE. Based on the system, you can create an easy-to-administer, flexible container storage that is highly reliable and faster to deliver data. The implementation of SUSE Enterprise Storage eliminates the link to proprietary vendors by moving to open, universal software-implemented storage.

With its container architecture, SUSE Enterprise Storage eliminates operating system dependencies and provides a single deployment procedure regardless of the environment you use. In addition, containers facilitate the management of the solution and the process of updating it.

The cephadm-based administration framework replaces all previously used frameworks for products from different vendors. The dashboard provides a comprehensive display of the status of the vault, reducing the likelihood of operator error and simplifying basic administration tasks. You no longer need to manage the cluster using the CLI - now the main features are available from the GUI.

The solution enables storage for Kubernetes environments, enabling enterprises to reduce IT infrastructure and costs by co-hosting computing resources and storage in a Kubernetes cluster.

SUSE took care of organizations with infrastructure based on, Windows handing over the Open Source first driver of the block access interface to Ceph to the community. If the iSCSI gateway was previously required for the corresponding tasks, now, thanks to the driver, the configuration has been simplified and the delay in working with the storage has been significantly reduced.

SUSE Enterprise Storage 7 users note that the container architecture and cephadm provide significant benefits for the solution. In particular, the procedures for changing the cluster have accelerated, and in addition, it has become easier to control its settings, thanks to configuration files compiled in the declarative language YAML.

2016: SUSE Enterprise Storage 3

In June 2016, SUSE announced the release of SUSE Enterprise Storage 3, a commercially supported software release of software-defined storage, which is based on the version of the Ceph Jewel ACT project (v10.2.0)^[1].

The product has a stable file system Ceph Filesystem (CephFS). According to SUSE's President of Strategic Alliances and Marketing, Michael Miller, SUSE Enterprise Storage 3 will allow enterprises to transform their infrastructure to easily adapt to new technologies, while remaining elastic using fault-tolerant redundant cluster configurations based on standard architecture servers.

Sage Vail's doctoral thesis, defended in 2007 at the University of California, serves to manage object storage with distributed cluster architecture and provides interfaces for organizing object, block, and file access to data. By over-replicating the data across the nodes of the cluster, it achieves full fault tolerance, and the storage itself is able to scale to exabyte scales. This architecture allows you to create a software-defined storage system that is self-healing and self-managing, which reduces the cost of administration.

Among the product innovations, SUSE representatives note a POSIX-compatible interface to the CephFS file system, multi-gated replication, which provides disaster-tolerant replication of data between clusters located at a long distance from each other, and a framework that simplifies system management operations through an improved graphical user interface.

SUSE and HPE announced the joint release of the HPE Scalable Object Storage Solution running SUSE Enterprise Storage 3 on the standard ProLiant server platform and optimized for storage tasks of the Apollo and Cloudline models.

2015: SUSE Enterprise Storage Comes to Market

On February 17, 2015, SUSE announced the release of SUSE Enterprise Storage, an enterprise distributed storage software solution.

SUSE Enterprise Storage can provide organizations with cost-effective, reliable, and highly scalable storage on COTS (commodity off-the-shelf) disk arrays.

Advantages

• Cost reduction,
• ease of introduction
• high availability of data.

SUSE Enterprise Storage is offered as an option to SUSE OpenStack Cloud or as a separate distributed storage solution.

2014: Beta testing

On November 18, 2014, SUSE announced the start of beta testing of the new SUSE Storage product. According to developers, the finished version should appear in the first half of 2015.

Based on SUSE Storage - Ceph - Distributed Open Source Object Storage and File System.

According to developers, the new product is a self-healing, self-driving, distributed storage software solution aimed at enterprise customers. With SUSE Storage, they can build robust storage for rapidly growing amounts of information based on low-cost, consumer-class disk arrays.

SDS technology, which is an implementation of one or more virtualization methods, is aimed at separating the logical storage function from physical media. The idea is to completely abstract the storage functions from the hardware and organize access to them through unified software interfaces.

This approach eliminates the need for enterprises to buy expensive, specialized systems for creating high-availability storage, allows Windows, Linux, UNIX and other operating systems to share memory, makes it possible to consider storage as a single pool of resources that can be allocated and redistributed depending on changes in the workload, and has a number of other advantages.

SUSE Storage is built on the Ceph Firefly platform. It includes functionality for tiered caching, dynamic capacity allocation, remote replication, write copy, and erasure encoding.

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