Industry First: SUSE Introduces CephFS

CephFS Unlocks Universal Software Defined Storage

SUSE Enterprise Storage is based on Ceph, an open-source platform designed to provide storage from a highly-scalable, high-availability, cluster environment.

The foundation of Ceph is the Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store (RADOS), which provides object, block, and file system storage in a single unified storage cluster. The distributed architecture of Ceph RADOS is highly scalable with the ability to support thousands of application servers accessing up to exabytes of data. Each application can use the object, block, or file system interfaces to the same RADOS cluster simultaneously.

Ceph storage clusters are designed to run on white box servers, using the Controlled Replication Under Scalable Hashing (CRUSH) algorithm to distribute data evenly across the cluster.  Cluster nodes are then able to access data quickly without the type of bottlenecks found when scaling centralized storage architectures.

For cloud environments, Ceph object storage is accessible through Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift REST APIs, as well as a native API which can be used to integrate infrastructure or business applications.

Ceph block storage makes use of a Ceph Block Device, which is a virtual disk that can be attached to bare-metal Linux-based servers or to virtual machines (VMs). Ceph RADOS provides block storage services such as snapshots and replication. The RADOS Block Device (RBD) is also integrated with OpenStack Block Storage.

Ceph file storage (Ceph FS) is a POSIX-compliant file system which uses the same cluster as Ceph block storage and Ceph object storage.

SUSE is First to Deliver CephFS

In In 2016 the Ceph development team released Jewel, the tenth major version of Ceph. The Jewel release of Ceph provides significant new functionality, including support for CephFS. The availability of CephFS is the last building block needed for Ceph to fulfill the promise of delivering a universal solution for enterprise-class object, storage and file storage.SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 includes the industry’s first production-ready version of CephFS. By adding much-anticipated native filesystem access, SES 4 allow customers to deploy a unified block, object and file storage environment to reduce the capital and operational costs of their storage infrastructure.

IT Brand Pulse Industry First Validation

In a sea of high-powered IT advertising, IT Brand Pulse delivers test and research data to capture the performance, market position and perceptions of IT professionals about data center infrastructure. When a company is first with a new IT product or feature, we prove it through our Industry First Validation Program. For CephFS, we searched for competitive offerings and contacted both vendors and IT pros, and  validated that SUSE is first to ship  a production-ready version of CephFS. Learn more IT Brand Pulse and the Industry First Validation Program at www.itbrandpulse.com.