By integrating Ceph with SUSE Cloud, the first OpenStack-powered private cloud solution, SUSE is delivering the most reliable, cost-effective distributed storage infrastructure available for private clouds.

Cloud platforms, and the services running on them, face challenges of scalability, reliability and integration with existing storage options. Growing demand for data storage in virtualized environments is limited by expensive, proprietary solutions that are unable to scale and require excessive demands on the IT staff. These challenges are addressed by the new partnership. Both SUSE Cloud and Ceph are based on open source, giving companies the flexibility to use existing infrastructure to design the best cloud deployments for their individual needs.

Ceph is a fully open source, distributed object store, network block device, and POSIX-compatible distributed file system designed for reliability, performance, and scalability - from terabytes to exabytes. Ceph’s architecture is based on an object storage service that provides a generic, scalable storage platform with support for distributed computation. This storage backend is used, among other things, to provide a simple network block device (RBD) with thin provisioning and snapshots. Integrated into the Linux kernel and the OpenStack project, Ceph is self-healing, self-managing with no single point of failure and runs on commodity hardware, freeing organizations of all sizes from the limitations and expense of propriety storage solutions.

The partnership between Inktank and SUSE makes expert technical support available so that SUSE Cloud customers can quickly leverage Ceph for their cloud storage needs. SUSE Cloud automates set-up and management tasks of cloud infrastructure, including Ceph distributed storage environments, by leveraging the Crowbar software framework, an open source project sponsored by Dell.

“SUSE Cloud is designed for companies that want to increase agility and reduce costs with private and hybrid cloud solutions. Companies embracing cloud and working with big data need highly scalable and reliable storage. Ceph’s technology meets those demanding requirements,” said Michael Miller, vice president of global alliances and marketing, SUSE. “Together SUSE and Inktank are helping more companies leverage the power of the open source cloud, and backing that technology with industry leading services and support.”

Suse, Ubuntu supported by Canonical, metacloud and Dreamhost are some of the partners of Inktank in implementing Ceph.