Serious About Storage @SUSE

I'm passionate about storage. I began my storage journey in the 1980s by optimizing the data layouts, changing the interleave of my hard drives, teaching others about fragmentation and what to do about it, and generally being a geek about the different local storage interfaces available at the time (ST506, ESDI, SCSI).

This passion moved on to networked storage both via Novell Netware and via NFS, culminating in me finding myself in a job working for what was to become a major storage vendor in the late 1990s. During that tour and subsequent jobs where I worked with customers ranging from small business to the largest of the large enterprises, I learned, thought, and taught storage. Often times, this involved stitching technologies together in a new way for my customers to realize advanced value.

Today, I still get to do the same for another up and coming storage player, SUSE. I hear you already, "Wait?!? SUSE?!?! The Linux company?"

Absolutely! Here at SUSE, we are completely serious about our storage business. So much so, that we have built a crack team of open source storage experts. We've had folks at the block and file-system levels for a long time, and several years ago, we added more top-notch talent for building SUSE Enterprise Storage and brought some of our existing experts to the challenge as well. We've also built a global team with storage experts in APAC, EMEA, and the Americas to ensure our customers and partners are well served at all points of their relationship with SUSE around storage.

We've added strength to our mix by working closely with our alliance partners to bring SUSE Enterprise Storage based solutions to the market. You can get validated solutions from HPE, Lenovo, Cisco, SuperMicro, etc. We have relationships with distributors, VARs, and OEM partners. We work with ISV partners to validate their solutions with SUSE Enterprise Storage and bring the exceptional value that their solutions combined with open source provide enterprise customers. All of these are intended to ensure that customers can integrate this next generation technology with their existing applications and processes without heartache and pain.

Just to put a little proof behind my claims, I'll point to the number of industry awards SUSE has managed to pick up. These are great and show customer and media acceptance of SUSE in the storage business, but we've also managed to garner something that tends to have a heavier weighting by enterprise customers, being in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage two years running.

This last item is a significant achievement. Prior to coming to SUSE, I failed to understand the level of rigor that is associated with the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Having now been involved in the process multiple times, I can safely say that it has validity and takes into account many factors, including some relatively high participation criteria.

However, it is important to note that the survey represents a point in time snapshot of released product capabilities and execution. For this year's survey, SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 was used. While the product is solid and provides a good value for customers, there are many major advancements with our version 5 product that will ship by the end of October. You can find out more about the release here.

This year's survey also made note of our newly introduced SUSE Enterprise Storage certification program. This extremely new program is designed to be more than just a marketing certification. We believe strongly that full-blown solutions, involving all components of a deployed system deserve to be tested and have the YES certification if they prove to meet the requirements of the program. While not required, customers that take advantage of systems that have gone through this process have a higher level of assurance that the system has been tested and validated beyond just a basic testing of the operating system, which is what some of our competitors do.

All this being said, it's not about what you've done, but what you're going to do that keeps you in the storage business, and in that vein, I am very excited about where we are going. We've already made giant leaps with SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 around performance, management, and orchestration, and we aren't slowing down anytime soon. You can get a flavor of some of the things we are looking at in this presentation from SUSECon 17.

Keep your eyes peeled as SUSE continues to mature and bring open source software-defined storage solutions to our customers and partners.