Sardina throws bait toward SUSE Enterprise Storage users

Wiggles tiny price for FishOS Ceph-based wares as deprecation of Ceph continues

Updated Sardina hopes to entice anyone still using SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES) over to FishOS instead with a price-based hook: €1 plus a software license fee based on a system's size and requirements, following a per-core model.

Sardina Systems has been around since 2014 selling its FishOS cloud management platform, which combines Openstack, Ceph and Kubernetes. The timing of the new special €1 offer is in response to SUSE's continuing gradual withdrawal from Ceph storage.

SUSE acquired Kubernetes-flogger Rancher Labs in 2020, and a few months later in early 2021 it decided to cancel its Ceph-based SUSE Enterprise Storage offering. Its exit from the Ceph storage space is still continuing: Sardina highlights a recent email on the Ceph users list, which in turn points to mails in which the maintainer of the Ceph client in openSUSE is stepping down, and for SLE customers, this announcement:

9.3 ceph client packages deprecation

The […] ceph client packages have been deprecated and will be removed in 15 SP7

Ceph is a FOSS storage tool, as Register sister site Blocks & Files regularly covers. The easiest way to picture Ceph is as a sort of wide-area cluster equivalent of RAID. While RAID lets you strap together several drives on one machine to form a larger virtual drive, Ceph lets you cluster together multiple storage servers to form a pool of storage for your network. One of Ceph's key selling points is that those servers don't all need to be in the same place: they can be spread across a country, continent, or indeed around the world.

SUSE was experimenting with a simpler replacement Ceph-based storage tool called Aquarium, but it didn't take off and the Github repository was archived in 2023. SUSE's current storage offering only targets Kubernetes users.

In a statement, a spokesperson at SUSE told The Register:

"SUSE Storage as the current storage offering from SUSE, based on the Longhorn project, represents a forward-looking, container-native evolution. It supersedes the end-of-life SUSE Enterprise Storage, which was a more traditional, broader software-defined storage solution. SUSE has been working with all of its customers on the optimal solution for their current and future software-defined storage requirements."

Several other companies will also happily sell you comparable storage, of course — but it won't come cheap. This is enterprise-level stuff, and the product pages tend not to have a Pricing section. If you're a big enough customer to need this sort of thing, negotiations can to start with questions like "what sort of number did you have in mind?"

Red Hat is more focused on the rival Gluster storage technology. That costs somewhere around $4,500 per node per year. Red Hat does have a Ceph offering too, and that will set you back somewhere in the ballpark of $32K a year for 12 nodes.

By comparison, one euro per node sounds like quite the bargain. FishOS does seem to do the job; we found some positive comments about it. Sardina's announcement points to a case study involving German cloud vendor Grass-Merkur, and the OpenInfra Foundation reported positively on that. Sardina has prior form for offering help migrating from discontinued platforms: for example, when Israeli startup Stratoscale closed down after a few years, Sardina offered help moving to FishOS.

We have asked Sardina what customers might expect to pay after the initial discount offer runs out. ®

Updated to add at 1312 UTC on May 29

When we asked about pricing post initial discount offer, Sardina offered us a comparison with the Red Hat pricing we linked to in the story, saying: "Our licensing model is based on a per-core structure, independent of the number of nodes or the type/size of disks."

This means that the pricing isn't directly, one-to-one comparable, but it suggested that compared to 12 nodes and 256TB of Red Hat Ceph Storage, using FishOS for 96 CPU cores and NVMe storage, it would be €14,400 per year, and just €3,600 per year for spinning rust. Three-way replication costs more than two-way replication, and so does erasure coding, but even so, the company says: "FishOS offers significantly lower cost per TB than Red Hat Ceph, especially with HDD-based setups. It can be up to 5–10x more cost-efficient."