SUSE Says Tschüss To Ceph-based Enterprise Storage Product – It's Rancher's Longhorn From Here On Out

SUSE is scrapping its Ceph-based SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES) product. The German Linux shop has not officially announced the move, but we understand it informed some partners and customers of its decision in December.

We were alerted to SES's impending demise via a posting in the Ceph-users lists by Adam Boyhan, dated 16 February: "A few weeks ago I was informed that SUSE is shutting down SES and will no longer be selling it."

A wander over to the SUSE shop showed that SES could not be purchased, so we asked the company to explain.

Thomas Di Giacomo, chief technology & product officer at SUSE, emailed a statement:

SUSE acquired Rancher Labs, a Kubernetes management software vendor, in December 2020 – so about the same time it decided to scrap SES. Rancher's Longhorn provides persistent storage to containers.

Ceph is an open-source distributed object storage platform which supports file and block access protocols and object access. The first stable release was in July 2012 and the platform has steadily developed since then. Red Hat is the most prominent supporter of Ceph, which is part of the company's OpenShift Container Storage platform. The company bought Inktank, the main developer of Ceph, in 2014.

SUSE developed SES as an extension for its Linux distribution, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). The company released SES in February 2015. SES 6 was released in summer 2019 and this added a graphical user interface. A version 7 was planned at that time. This would deploy Ceph in containers, supply storage to containers, and use the Rook orchestrator for Kubernetes.

SUSE was acquired from MicroFocus by EQT, a Swedish private equity firm, in 2018. EQT aims to IPO SUSE and is targeting a $6bn valuation, according to various financial news reports. ®