SUSE shows highest functional score of Ceph distributions in Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for Object Storage Research*

* Critical Capabilities for Object Storage – Published: 25 January 2018 ID: G00304492

It is not easy to get onto a Gartner research note: you have to have the right – and robust – product capabilities, be able to demonstrate them in rigorous questionnaires, and you have to wait for an outcome you can’t control. While you wait for the verdict, you know the analysts don’t take your word for it and that they will have been talking to your actual customers: ‘‘OK, so you’ve deployed SUSE Enterprise Storage – what’s your experience been like, what should other enterprises look out for?”

It’s this combination which makes Gartner so compelling for IT leaders – the mix of detailed capability comparisons based on verifiable data, skilled practitioner opinion, and real customer feedback. As you can imagine, we at SUSE are pleased to have made it on to the Gartner Critical Capabilities for Object Storage report for the very first time. This is a milestone for us, clearly demonstrating the distance we’ve travelled from ‘outsider,’ to a place where we are in the same competitive set as Dell EMC, NetApp, IBM and Huawei.

There are three clear takeaways:

Key takeaway #1 – who’s got the best Ceph?

In Gartner’s assessment of object storage capabilities against specific use cases, SUSE Enterprise Storage ranked ahead of Red Hat Ceph for analytics, archiving, backup, content distribution, and cloud storage. Are you wondering if Red Hat ranked ahead of SUSE on other use cases in the report? Nope: SUSE ranked ahead in every use case covered by Gartner. SUSE is positioned 9^th out of 13 overall, against a backdrop where Gartner says there’s a range of pricing, ‘with open source and new entrants pricing at the low end’ and ‘the established vendors . . . . . at the high end’. Given that SUSE Enterprise Storage is about value we’ve got every reason to be patting ourselves on the back.

Key takeaway #2 – ‘the driving force behind the adoption of object storage is cost reduction’

This is the first sentence in the report: and for storage buyers and businesses trying to deal with huge volumes of data without breaking the bank, it’s a critical one. This is where SUSE has staked out its ground: we believe we offer the best value in market available today, and that is measureable in dollars per terabyte.

Key takeaway #3. SUSE Enterprise Storage isn’t limited to Object.

In this note, Gartner has assessed SUSE Enterprise Storage on the basis of our object storage capabilities alone. That’s one third of the picture: SUSE Enterprise Storage also supports file and block, making SUSE Enterprise Storage one of the few truly unified solution.

So, in summary this report highlights that SUSE Enterprise Storage scores very well across all use cases and with a clear strength on value and return on investment. Our flexible business practices and simplistic pricing model for SUSE Enterprise Storage cement this advantage.

It is also testament to the Ceph project and community efforts that two Ceph distributions are listed amongst the 13 products.

On a more technical/speed and feeds note, this report is based on the capabilities of SUSE Enterprise Storage 4. SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 shipped on October 31^st 2017 and now delivers:

• • The ability to service environments that require higher levels of performance through the enablement of the new “BlueStore” native object storage backend for Ceph. SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 offers up to double the write performance of previous releases, coupled with significant reductions in I/O latency.
  • The ability to free up capacity and reduce data footprint via BlueStore enabled Data Compression.
  • Increased disk space efficiency of a fault tolerant solution through enablement of Erasure coding for Replicated block devices and CephFS data.
  • Lowered operational cost with an expanded advanced graphical user interface for simplified management and improved cost efficiency, using the next generation openATTIC open source storage management system.
  • Simplified cluster management and orchestration through enhanced Salt integration.

You can read the full Gartner research note, with our compliments, here.

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