SUSE Enterprise Storage: What next?

Late last year, SUSE completed their acquisition of Rancher Labs, and in doing so, has had to make some decisions on their product roadmap and ongoing support commitments.

SUSE Enterprise Storage, SUSE’s software-defined storage product based on Ceph, doesn’t appear to have made the cut. According to their support pages, it is scheduled for End of Life with milestones in January 2021 and 2022.

If you are currently running SUSE Enterprise Storage 6, general support will end 31st January 2022. It appears there is a limited path forward for one last year of support, by upgrading to SES 7, but other alternatives could be considered, especially in the light of the recent developments.

So, what next?

When it comes to choosing a storage solution, the lifecycle of that system and the longevity of it’s support can sometimes be overlooked.

The latest version of Canonical’s Charmed Ceph supports the Octopus (15.2.x) and Pacific (16.2.x) releases of Ceph, deployed on Ubuntu LTS 20.04, where you can be assured that you will have support for up to 10 Years (from the initial release of a long term support [LTS] version of Ubuntu).

A flexible future

Charmed Ceph provides support for all protocols:

• For block – RBD
• For object – RGW (Swift and S3 APIs are available)
• For file – CephFS and NFS
• For legacy block workloads like VMware – iSCSI

Charmed Ceph can be deployed on its own, or integrated with Charmed OpenStack or Charmed Kubernetes.

Of course, moving between different vendor’s solutions can be quite involved, so Canonical’s consulting services are available to help with deployment, optimisation, and any data migration required

This end of support event may also provide you with another unique opportunity, where you can not only modernise your deployment, but also adopt a managed storage infrastructure. This allows you to concentrate on your business and treat your storage as a utility service, with Canonical taking care of day to day operations.

Learn more

Canonical is ready to help SUSE Enterprise Storage users navigate their way forward. Find out more about Charmed Ceph, or if you are currently using SUSE Ceph, get in touch.