SUSE EOL – What next?

What does the announced end-of-life (EOL) mean? In the first step, there will be no more new installations of SUSE Enterprise Storage, the product will no longer be listed and sold. Support and also capacity expansions for existing SES customers will continue on a limited basis. In the short to medium term, SES customers will have to look for alternatives, because SUSE wants to concentrate on containerized storage solutions in the future and no longer focus on the further development of SUSE Enterprise Storage.

Where is SUSE Enterprise Storage used?

SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES) is a software-based solution built on Ceph distributed object storage. SES makes it easy to build a Ceph cluster based on low-cost x86 standard servers. The key features and benefits of SUSE Enterprise Storage are:

• Software-based storage solution based on open source Ceph technology
• Use of low-cost commodity hardware
• Scale-out cluster architecture
• Centralized management for object, block, and file storage
• Easy handling thanks to self-healing and self-managementt
• High availability without single point of failure

What are the alternatives now?

The use cases for SUSE Enterprise Storage vary widely, but the goal behind it can be summed up simply: SES customers are looking for a cost-effective and flexible storage solution for large volumes of data.

With this goal in mind, iCAS FS is an interesting alternative for SES customers who want to continue to focus on openness, cost efficiency, and scalability. The software-based scale-out platform iCAS FS is also based on Linux (installed and maintained directly by iTernity), a distributed file system, and x86 hardware. As such, it delivers the benefits of SUSE Enterprise Storage described above: iCAS FS is exceptionally cost-effective, infinitely scalable, open, flexible, and highly available.

But iTernity's scale-out platform also offers other benefits which can turn the bitter pill of SES discontinuation into a positive outcome:

• No effort: thanks to a and managed services concept, users have hardly any effort with the system. In concrete terms, this means 61% less management effort compared to the public cloud, and 76% less compared to proprietary storage systems (ESG Economic Validation). This also has a significant impact on total cost of ownership, as iCAS FS enables savings of 53% compared to the public cloud.
• Compliance focus: iCAS FS brings all the features needed for long-term protection of business-critical data, such as WORM storage, retention management, encryption, synchronous and asynchronous replication, and self-healing. Different clients can be flexibly managed in separate repositories.
• One platform, many use cases: iCAS FS is ideally suited for protecting data from different applications and sources. For example, the scale-out platform allows you to offload your primary storage, can be used as a WORM archive, secure backup target, or for cold data filing and big data tiering. And all this in one platform, without any effort for your IT.
• Start small, grow as needed: iCAS FS can be started very little. All that is required is a standard Ethernet network for the node connection and no training or complex services. After the simple start, there are no limits to the system, as it can be scaled indefinitely by adding more nodes.