SUSE Refines its Platform for Cloud-Native, Containerized Applications as Enterprises Move to Hybrid and Multi-Cloud

As businesses are transforming their IT landscapes to support present and future demands, SUSE is providing the foundation for both their traditional and growing containerized workloads with the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 1.

Enterprises need the capability to design, deploy and run cloud-native, microservices-based applications as part of a DevOps approach. They must be able to deliver modern containerized applications with orchestration tools such as Kubernetes that enable secure and agile development and deployment from the edge to on-premise to hybrid to multi-cloud environments. At the same time, traditional systems are widely used to host mission-critical workloads like databases and ERP systems. Today’s enterprises have multimodal IT infrastructures that run multimodal workloads, and SUSE Linux Enterprise is a bridge between traditional and cloud – the world’s first multimodal operating system that enables enterprises to continually innovate, compete and grow.

“SUSE Linux Enterprise is a modern and modular OS that helps simplify multimodal IT, making traditional IT infrastructure efficient and providing an engaging platform for developers,” said Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE president of Engineering, Product and Innovation. “As a result, organizations can easily deploy and transition business-critical workloads across their core on-premise and public cloud environments. SUSE’s open, open source approach means we work with our customers’ preferred partners and vendors, minimizing customer disruption as they innovate and evolve their systems to meet business needs.”

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP1 advances the multimodal OS model by enhancing the core tenets of the common code base, modularity and community development while hardening business-critical attributes such as optimized workloads, data security and reduced downtime. Highlights include:

Faster and easier transition from community Linux to enterprise Linux –

It now takes just a few clicks for developers and operations to move an openSUSE Leap system to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Organizations also benefit from a tremendously enriched SUSE Package Hub, which is fast becoming a go-to destination for the community to build best-in-class applications with an enterprise platform. This brings the benefits of enterprise support for production systems to community openSUSE Leap-developed systems.

Enhanced support for edge to HPC workloads –

In Service Pack 1, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Arm 15 has doubled the number of supported system-on-a-chip (SoC) processor options. This broadens support for storage and industrial automation applications on 64-bit Arm server and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. For 64-bit Raspberry Pi devices, it now supports full HDMI audio and video and provides an ISO image for faster installation.

Mohamed Awad, vice president of marketing, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm, said, “The Arm server market continues to expand in diversity and choice for solution providers, enabling innovation for workloads ranging from IoT to HPC. Our collaboration with SUSE on the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Arm broadens the opportunity for greater innovation and growth of Arm Neoverse solutions with enterprise-class performance and reliability.”

Optimize workloads and minimize data latency –

As previously announced, with solutions running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on Intel Optane DC persistent memory and 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, businesses will be better able to address the challenges of massive data increases with greater speed and agility while incurring lower infrastructure and management costs.

Improved hardware-based data security –

Service Pack 1 features full support for AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology. First available as a developer preview in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15, SEV enables guest virtual machines to run in encrypted memory, helping protect them from memory scrape attacks from the hypervisor. SP1 also supports AMD Secure Memory Encryption (SME) which uses a single key to encrypt system memory.

Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president and chief technical officer, Datacenter Ecosystems and Application Engineering, AMD, said, “SEV is an exciting technology. With SEV, guests in public and private cloud instances can have greater confidence that their private data stays private. In a world where security is important, SEV offers hardware-accelerated memory encryption for data-in-use. SEV support in SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP1 will help enhance security for today’s workloads.”

Reduced downtime for updates –

Transactional updates (a tech preview in Service Pack 1) offer a significant reduction in the maintenance window for updates, increasing production uptime.

Simplified installation with enhanced Modular+ –

The Unified Installer, introduced in SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 to give customers a simplified way to engage with SUSE products, can be used to install more portfolio products, including SUSE Manager, SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time and SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service.

Vast and growing SUSE Linux Enterprise ecosystem

Nearly 3,300 software applications are certified on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 and 15. The diversity of certified applications demonstrates the breadth of multimodal workloads used by enterprises. In the last year, 16 per cent of new certifications are for software storage, 15 per cent are for management software, 11 per cent are for enterprise resource management applications, 10 per cent for hospitality and tourism software, and 9 per cent for security software. The remaining 40 per cent include data management software, CRM applications and others.

Michael Reiserer, a consultant at ApiOmat said, “With SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15, ApiOmat provides companies with a platform to build their own digital services and accelerate the pace of innovation. Thanks to ready-to-use connectors such as LDAP, JDBC or SAML, legacy IT applications can be easily connected which considerably reduces development effort. Using SUSE’s multimodal OS platform, companies can create applications that are independent of specific enterprise systems or cloud services.”

Steven Graves, CEO of McObject, said, “Certification on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 is important to McObject because of SUSE’s strong market presence and solid customer base. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 provides a very stable environment, so we were able to certify eXtremeDB with ease. The overall process was quick and straightforward.”