LOS ANGELES and NUREMBERG, Germany, Nov. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Inktank and SUSE® today announced a strategic partnership to jointly provide enterprise-grade support for the Ceph Distributed Storage System as part of SUSE Cloud. Inktank is the only company today providing enterprise-grade, commercial support for Ceph. With this agreement, Inktank will ensure that SUSE Cloud customers receive the same level of open source support that SUSE has delivered over the past twenty years. And 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. 

As companies increasingly move their applications to the cloud, IT organizations are seeking open and flexible cloud solutions that can provide highly scalable storage to handle their ever-growing data requirements. 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. The Future of Storage™, Ceph provides cloud storage that is self-healing and self-managing, while autoscaling to accommodate even the most demanding enterprise needs. SUSE Cloud simplifies deployment and ongoing administration of physical cloud infrastructure. 

Ceph is integrated into the OpenStack project and provides highly scalable object and block storage for cloud deployments using SUSE Cloud, which is powered by OpenStack. The partnership between Inktank and SUSE makes expert technical support available so SUSE Cloud customers can quickly leverage Ceph for their cloud storage needs. SUSE will provide support for Ceph components directly to all customers of SUSE Cloud. Inktank will provide engineering support to SUSE to ensure quick resolution of technical issues.

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. Both Inktank and SUSE are active contributors to the Crowbar Project, which helps ensure a joint OpenStack and Ceph solution that can be implemented simply, giving IT organizations maximum flexibility to configure their clouds.

"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."

"Ceph's uniquely scalable architecture makes it ideal for the cloud. That's why Ceph is being swiftly embraced by the industry and being integrated into the Linux kernel, OpenStack and a growing number of other cloud platforms," said Bryan Bogensberger, president and COO, Inktank.  "Inktank is eager to work with SUSE to bring Ceph's transformational storage capabilities to more customers, while giving them the support they need to get the most out of their cloud investments."

"SUSE and Inktank are actively contributing to Crowbar, an open source software framework developed by Dell and leveraged in Dell OpenStack and Hadoop solutions, to deliver a simple to use and robust provisioning framework," said John Igoe, executive director of cloud and big data solutions, Dell. "We're excited that SUSE and Inktank are working with us to extend the capabilities of Crowbar to support the easy deployment of Ceph as part of a SUSE Cloud private cloud environment."

To learn more about SUSE Cloud, please visit www.suse.com/susecloud. To learn more about Inktank's enterprise-level support for Ceph, please visit http://www.inktank.com.

About SUSE
SUSE®, a pioneer in open source software, provides reliable, interoperable Linux and cloud infrastructure solutions that give enterprises greater control and flexibility. More than 20 years of engineering excellence, exceptional service and an unrivaled partner ecosystem power the products and support that help our customers manage complexity, reduce cost, and confidently deliver mission-critical services. The lasting relationships we build allow us to adapt and deliver the smarter innovation they need to succeed—today and tomorrow. For more information, visit us at www.suse.com.

Copyright © 2012 Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. SUSE is a registered trademark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

About Inktank
Inktank is the company delivering Ceph—the massively scalable, open source, distributed storage system. Launched by some of the leading developers of Ceph, Inktank's mission is to help organizations fully leverage the transformative power of Ceph to decrease storage costs, increase operational flexibility and help them free themselves from restrictive and expensive proprietary storage systems.  Inktank provides best-in-class professional services and support offerings to enterprise organizations, service providers, and cloud platforms. Please visit www.inktank.com for more information.

About Ceph
Ceph, The Future of Storage™, is a transformative, universal storage system. Ceph is the first and only distributed storage solution designed to enable object, block and filesystem storage in a single cluster with unlimited scalability.  The platform is capable of auto-scaling to the exabyte level and beyond, it runs on commodity hardware, it is self-healing and self-managing, and has no single point of failure.  Ceph is in the Linux kernel; Ceph can be accessed natively via programming languages; Ceph can be accessed via the Swift and S3 APIs; Ceph is integrated with the OpenStack™ cloud operating system; and Ceph is integrated with the Apache CloudStack project.  As a result of its open source nature, this portable storage platform may be installed and used in public or private clouds.  Please visit www.ceph.com for more information.

SOURCE SUSE