If your business is sick of managing storage by managing nasty platters of spinning rust by hand, you should look at SUSE's SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES) 4.

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SES 4, a software-defined storage system, is powered by Ceph. This is a distributed object store and file system. It, in turn, relies on a resilient and scalable storage model (RADOS) using clusters of commodity hardware. Along with the RADOS block device (RBD), and the RADOS object gateway (RGW), Ceph provides a POSIX file-system interface: CephFS. RBD and RGW have long been in use for production workloads but CephFS has been harder to use in the real world.

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SUSE claims SES 4 marks the first production release of CephFS. Red Hat, which introduced CephFS as a tech preview in Red Hat Ceph Storage 2, would beg to disagree.

Regardless of who got there first, with CephFS, SES 4 will work well for bulk, archive, and big data storage management. SES 4 is based on the Ceph Jewel release and excels at bulk, archive, and large data storage management.

"Bulk, archive, and large data is growing, and as it does, customers need flexible storage solutions that can handle the specific needs of their business and data without breaking the bank," said Gerald Pfeifer, SUSE VP of Products and Technology Programs, in a statement. "IT departments are finding they need to handle growing amounts of unstructured data while they are tasked with increasing innovation and reducing costs. SES helps them do exactly that with open-source technology."

Exactly what? Well, you will be able to more easily manage and scale out massive data applications such as CCTV video, online presence and training, streaming media, medical imaging, and CAD datasets. It also enables customers to run production workloads for block, object, and file storage within a single cluster, further reducing capital and operation costs.

It's not just these big data cases. Gartner estimates that "by 2021, more than 80 percent of enterprise data will be stored in scale-out storage systems in enterprise and cloud data centers, up from 30 percent today."

Specifically, SUSE claims the following benefits to using SES 4:

Reduced capital and operational spending for storage infrastructure via a truly unified block, object, and files solution with the production-ready Ceph file system (CephFS).

Expanded hardware choice for enterprise and hyper-scale customers with support for 64-bit ARM.

An advanced graphical user interface for simplified management and improved cost efficiency using the openATTIC open-source storage management system.

Better data protection and improved disaster recovery via long-distance replication for block storage and multi-site object storage replication.

Improved cluster orchestration using Salt for simplified storage cluster management.

Technical preview access to NFS Ganesha support and NFS access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 buckets.

In related storage news, SUSE also announced today it has acquired specific software-defined storage management assets from it-novum. The most important of these are openATTIC. This is an important, open-source Ceph and storage management framework.

SES 4 will be generally available in December.

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