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At SUSECon in Prague, Linux-power SUSE introduced the latest version of its software-defined storage program, SUSE Enterprise Storage 5.

Accordinging to SUSE, this new release features enhanced ease of management, improved performance and expanded features including new disk-to-disk backup capabilities for enterprise customers.

"Every generation of enterprise infrastructure innovation is now being built on open source," said Gerald Pfeifer, SUSE's VP of Products and Technology Programs. "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."

The need for software-defined storage is clear. Gartner analysts said:

It has become painfully evident that storage capacity demands, and expectations for far more rapid provisioning of that storage, have far outpaced the ability of [infrastructure and operations] teams' capabilities. Far-more-automated systems are required to restore a sense of balance, that is, storage solutions that offer much greater scale, but also much more automation.

SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 addresses these needs transforming their enterprise storage infrastructures.

This release is based on the brand new Ceph open-source project Luminous release, and it is ideally suited for compliance, archive, backup and large data storage. It is also the first commercial offering to support Ceph's new higher performance BlueStore native object backend.

With these updates SUSE claims BlueStore-enabled data compression will offer as much as double the write performance of previous releases. It also comes with significant reductions in I/O latency. This also increases disk-space efficiency by enabling erasure coding for replicated block devices and CephFS data.

To access this data, SUSE Enterprise Storage supports Network File System (NFS); NFS Gateway exporting CephFS; RADOS object gateway (RGW); and enabling legacy file applications, which require a filesystem interface to access cloud Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift data. It also includes a technical preview to export file system to CIFS/Samba for PC connectivity.

The program also boasts an improved graphical user interface for simplified management using the openATTIC open-source storage management system. In addition, using Salt DevOps the program comes with simplified cluster management and orchestration.

The program also includes backup and archive applications. These include Veritas NetBackup, Commvault, and Micro Focus Data Protector, along with compliance solutions such as iTernity

It also now offers a scalable, self managing, fault tolerant disk-to-disk backup solution. This also incorporates deduplication services to reduce the overall storage volume by eliminating duplicated data. This is certified with enterprise backup software, including Commvault and Veritas.

According to a recent study by IT Brand Pulse, "The cost data says SUSE is the clear value leader led by best-in-class pricing model which includes support in the software license and, unlike others where license costs are front-loaded, the cost of a software is spread out evenly over the five years."

SUSE Enterprise Server 5 will be available in the fourth quarter.

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