A report from SUSECon:

While out in the streets of DC there was alternately depression and elation, gnashing of teeth and celebration, at SUSECon yesterday, SUSE announced SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack 2 designed to power physical, virtual and cloud-based mission-critical environments. The goal with this release is to help SLE users accelerate innovation, improve system reliability, meet ever more challenging security requirements and adapt to the accelerating pace of new technologies. SUSE expressed great pride in the fact that 2/3 of the Fortune Global 100 are currently using SLE.

“SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP2 has already earned rave reviews from partners and beta testers worldwide,” said SUSE VP of SLE Engineering, Olaf Kirch. “SUSE is committed to enabling customers to bring their state-of-the-art solutions to market faster by leveraging the latest technologies. They also need to run mission-critical workloads with maximum uptime and proven security. This latest version of SLE helps them do both using all the advantages of open source software.”

Enhancements in SLE 12 Service Pack 2 include: · A 10x increase in packet processing via software-defined networking which combines Open vSwitch with the Data Plane Development Kit. Added to SLE’s broad hypervisor support, the integration of DPDK gives users a complete virtualization solution for cloud and on-premise deployment.

· Even more agile support for SAP applications to ease migration to S/4HANA, accelerate deployment of SAP apps, tune SAP HANA for performance and create a more resilient & secure SAP environment with enhanced support for SAP HANA clusters even on geo levels.

· Further reduced downtime and improved I/O performance through persistent system memory applications using integrated NVDIMMs that save data in seconds and make it immediately available upon reboot.

· Increased ability to implement cost-effective, high performance data analytics on IBM Power Systems LC and OpenPower servers, including bare metal support.

· Time & resource saving “skip service packs” functionality allowing users to skip upgrades of prior service packs and jump straight to SP2.

· Ongoing FIPS 140-2 certification to meet the strict security requirements of federal government, FISMA and the financial industry.

· Reduced downtime for large-memory IBM Power-based systems via minimized memory initialization times for server restarts, along with high availability and geo clustering support for IBM Power.

· Support for ARMv8-A, including enablement for Raspberry Pi3, making SLE12 SP2 one of the first commercially available enterprise Linux platforms for this architecture.

· Support for Intel’s scalable Omni-Path Architecture to deploy HPC workloads.

Input from HPE, Intel and other SUSE partners have enabled building NVDIMM capability as an integral component of the SLE 12 platform, offering users a serious carrot for early adoption. Scott Farrand, VP of Platform Software at HPE, said, “Next-generation applications, especially database and analytics applications, require new levels of performance. Through close collaborative engineering, HPE and SUSE have enabled support for NVDIMM technology on SLE12 SP2, allowing users to begin achieving and exceeding performance requirements for next-generation applications.”

While HP and SUSE have collaborated for 25 years now, the relationship between HPE and SUSE has obviously deepened and expanded recently; especially so over the last 6 months. This “partnership intensification” has even included discussions of “acquisition.” Michael Miller, SUSE’s President of Strategic Alliances, clarified what form that collaboration seems to be evolving into, saying SUSE and HPE are exploring all avenues of collaboration, “including the acquisition of technology and talent which would then be shared with ALL SUSE partners.” This open sharing with all partners is at the core of SUSE’s commitment to being the Open Open Source company.

SLE12 SP 2 images are also available for public cloud infrastructures, making it easier to offer public cloud services and migrate to public cloud from on-premise environments. For more info on all of SLE12 SP 2 visit www.suse.com/server