SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 now available

SUSE® has announced the general availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, the newest version of its reliable, scalable and secure platform for efficiently deploying and managing highly available enterprise-class IT services in physical, virtual or cloud infrastructure. New products based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 feature enhancements that more readily enable system uptime, improve operational efficiency and accelerate innovation. The foundation for all SUSE data centre operating systems and extensions, SUSE Linux Enterprise meets the performance requirements of data centres with mixed IT environments, while reducing the risk of technological obsolescence and vendor lock-in.

With this release, SUSE also introduces an updated customer portal, SUSE Customer Center, to make it easier for customers to manage their subscriptions, access patches and updates, and communicate with SUSE customer support.

“Given their competitive cost pressures, IT organisations today have a hard time responding quickly to changing business needs and leveraging innovation,” said Nils Brauckmann, president and general manager of SUSE. “SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 helps enterprises stay agile, reclaim budget and easily leverage future open source innovation, helping them compete more effectively now and in the future.”

Al Gillen, program vice president for servers and system software at IDC, said, “The industry is seeing growing movement of mission-critical workloads to Linux, with that trend expected to continue well into the future. The modular design of SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, as well as other mission-critical features like full system rollback and live kernel patching, helps address some of the key reservations customers express, and should help accelerate the adoption of Linux in this market segment.”

New operating systems and software extensions based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 include:

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for x86_64, IBM Power Systems and IBM System z – versatile server operating systems for delivering business-critical IT services in a variety of physical, virtual and cloud environments. New features like full system rollback, live kernel patching enablement and software modules increase data centre uptime, improve operational efficiency and accelerate the adoption of open source innovation. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 further builds on SUSE's leadership with Linux Containers technology and adds the Docker framework, which is now included as an integral part of the operating system.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server takes advantage of IBM POWER8 processor-based hardware optimisations that include support for little-endian Linux applications running on simultaneous multithreaded (SMT8) and PowerKVM environments. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z improves workload performance through instruction set exploitation for the last two generations of IBM System z processors, state-of-the art support for cryptographic accelerators and the related software stack, and enhancements for operational tasks like faster DASD formatting with dasdfmt or multiple point-to-point NETIUCV interfaces between Linux on System z and z/VM instances.

• SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension and Geo Clustering for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension – clustering software for increasing services availability, physical and virtual, local and global. A new web console, updated OCFS2 and GFS2 file system support, and the latest updates in ReaR for disaster recovery make protecting core business systems quick and easy.

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack – for boosting Windows virtual machine performance on Linux hosts. It now supports a wider variety of Windows operating systems, such as Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1.

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation Extension – for improving productivity while lowering costs and increasing security. Users can turn servers into full-featured development or administrator workstation environments.

Partners on SUSE Linux Enterprise 12
Duncan Campbell, HP vice president of EG Marketing Alliances: “The rapid pace of innovation requires businesses to strive for higher levels of performance from their infrastructure, with even greater importance on security and availability. With the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, HP has worked with SUSE to include significant performance improvements into the upstream kernel allowing data-intensive workloads on large systems to achieve record-breaking performance for mission-critical computing.”

Doug Balog, IBM Power Systems general manager: “SUSE's announcement of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 for little-endian mode on Power Systems enables a richer set of applications to easily take advantage of the higher performance and greater throughput of the POWER8 processor, making Power Systems an ideal solution for data-intensive workloads such as analytics. Combining the long collaboration of SUSE and IBM with the community efforts of the OpenPOWER foundation, we continue to see tremendous growth of enterprise-grade, open source applications becoming readily available for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on IBM Power Systems.”

Mauri Whalen, Intel vice president, software and services group, and director of core system software in the Open Source Technology Centre: “For close to two decades, Intel and SUSE have worked closely to offer reliable, efficient and high-performance solutions for mission-critical applications powered by Intel Xeon processors. Intel has worked with SUSE via its partner Linux driver program SUSE SolidDriver to ensure customers can easily take advantage of the latest innovations from Intel.”

Mike Gebele, Lenovo vice president of server systems and marketing, Enterprise Business Group: “The SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 focus on eliminating down time makes it a great platform for high performance and mission-critical in-memory database and analytic applications. Lenovo's x6 architecture and its advanced memory capabilities, combined with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, optimises in-memory database performance and analytics workloads. This platform combination also provides excellent economies of scale for OpenStack cloud workloads by providing the ability to run more virtual machines per node and enhances cloud efficiency with more virtual guests per machine.”

Rob Cashman, Unisys vice president, mission-critical servers and solutions: “Unisys and SUSE share a commitment to providing a highly available and scalable environment for modern mission-critical solutions to clients' key computing challenges. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 helps further that commitment through innovative features that can enable greater operational efficiency for heterogeneous applications communicating across the fabric architecture on the Forward! by Unisys™ enterprise computing platform.”

Sanjay Katyal, VMware vice president, global strategic alliances and OEMs: “We're pleased to work with SUSE to make SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 optimised for VMware vSphere®, the leading server virtualisation platform. By supporting open-vm-tools together, VMware and SUSE are creating a seamless experience for our mutual customers as they realise the benefits of the software-defined data centre.”

Dan Elder, Novacoast Linux Services manager: “SUSE Customer Center is a giant leap forward, offering a unified view of customers' SUSE subscriptions, system information, software updates and direct support. Our customers will benefit from the streamlined interface, which gives them access to all their SUSE information in a single location.”