After more than a quarter of testing, SUSE Linux GmbH is finally releasing its software-defined storage platform into general availability. The launch fills in another important part of the company’s cloud stack amid increasing competition from rivals.

The biggest threat to SUSE’s ambitions for the software-defined data center is Red Hat Inc., its old arch-nemesis from the Linux ecosystem. The addition of cloud computing into the competitive mix has not changed  the traditional balance of power between the long-time rivals, which the platform only reinforces.

SUSE Enterprise Storage is a commercial distribution of Ceph, one of the numerous storage options available for OpenStack, the cloud operating system at the heart of the company’s strategy. The technology gives developers greater flexibility in how they expose data for their applications.

That flexibility enables Ceph to support a much broader range of use cases than the more specialized alternatives in the upstream ecosystem, such as Swift and Cinder. The problem for SUSE is that Red Hat beat it to the punch.

Red Hat acquired Inktank Inc., the main developer of the Ceph technology, for $185 million more than six months before SUSE revealed its intention to enter the storage business. The deal not only bought Red Hat the startup’s technology but also – and perhaps even more importantly – its team, which includes many of the original engineers who created Ceph.

SUSE is differentiating its distribution where possible, starting with pricing. The company is licensing the platform at a “market-leading” rate of 0.1 cents per gigabyte per month, which is comparable to what the top service providers charge for capacity on their clouds. That poses an exceptionally low barrier to entry for enterprises, especially those already using the distributor’s Linux and OpenStack flavors, but it will need much more than competitive pricing to keep pace with Red Hat on the long term.