SUSE unveils Enterprise Storage 5.5 - software-defined storage solution

SUSE has announced the availability of SUSE Enterprise Storage 5.5, the intelligent software-defined storage solution, powered by Ceph technology. It enables IT organizations to transform enterprise storage infrastructure and reduce costs while providing unlimited scalability.

Gerald Pfeifer, SUSE Vice-President of Products and Technology Programs, says, "Organizations today face increasing pressure to become more agile and economically efficient in order to grow, compete and survive. They must leverage digital assets and information to fuel their progress. SUSE Enterprise Storage enables that as an affordable, easy-to-manage enterprise storage solution that harnesses open-source innovation without expensive proprietary hardware."

Ritu Jyoti, IDC Program Vice-President, Systems Infrastructure Research Portfolio, says, "SUSE's engineering investment to make SUSE Enterprise Storage easier to use has produced one of the industry's easiest-to-manage Ceph distributions. The inclusion of openATTIC, which is quickly becoming a norm for the Ceph distribution as Ceph Manager Dashboard, plays a large part in the prominence of SUSE Enterprise Storage as an enterprise consumable solution."

SUSE Enterprise Storage 5.5, based on the Ceph Luminous release, delivers a highly scalable and resilient storage environment with a single, unified software-defined storage cluster that provides object, block and file storage. It is ideal for bulk storage, compliance, archive, data protection, disaster recovery; large data file applications, big data applications, HPC storage, cloud storage and virtual machine storage. This version of SUSE Enterprise Storage contains performance, stability and management improvements, including

openATTIC enhancements and OpenStack integration – that help customers reduce costs and give them confidence to deploy open-source enterprise storage at scale.

Production support for CIFS/Samba for Ceph is also included; further expanding SUSE Enterprise Storage's ability to service non-Linux environments, particularly Windows. Version 5.5 has industry-first support for heterogeneous Ceph deployments (non-SUSE RBD and CephFS clients), enhanced security with embedded support of Linux kernel security module AppArmor, and the ability for the system to notify customers of events that are pre-determined and configured by the user. Documentation has been translated into additional languages reflecting SUSE's growing global market.