Are you ready for the world’s first Multimodal Operating System | SUSE Communities

Are you ready for the world’s first Multimodal Operating System

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Businesses are transforming their IT landscape to support their needs for today and tomorrow, with the capability to design, deploy and run cloud-native microservices based applications. Ultimately you need to deliver modern containerized applications with orchestration tools such as Kubernetes while accessing traditional systems that host mission critical databases and ERP systems.

Today’s enterprises have a multimodal IT infrastructure that runs a range of workloads. SUSE Linux Enterprise helps bridge between traditional and cloud – the world’s first multimodal operating system that enables enterprises to continually innovate, compete and grow.

MultimodalOS - SUSE Linux Enterprise 15

The modern and modular OS helps simplify multimodal IT, makes traditional IT infrastructure efficient and provides an engaging platform for developers. As a result, you can easily deploy and transition business-critical workloads across on-premise and public cloud environments.

Today, SUSE releases SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 1, marking the one-year anniversary since we launched the world’s first multimodal OS.  SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP1 advances the multimodal OS model by enhancing the core tenets of common code base, modularity and community development while hardening business-critical attributes such as data security, reduced downtime and optimized workloads.

Here are the highlights of new functions and features delivered with SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 1.

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 SP1, 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.

“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.” Mohamed Awad, Vice President of Marketing, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. 

Optimize workloads and minimize data latency

As previously announced, SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 supports 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, formerly code named “Cascade Lake,” and is the first enterprise Linux optimized for Intel Optane DC persistent memory with SAP HANA workloads. Common benefits of persistent memory include:

  • Cost-effective, large-capacity in-memory database solutions
  • More system uptime and faster recovery after power cycles
  • Virtual machine storage acceleration
  • Higher performance for multi-node, distributed cloud applications
  • Advanced encryption for persistent data built into the hardware

Improved hardware based data security

With the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 1, SUSE announces full support for AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology. First available as a developer preview in SLES 15, SEV enables guest virtual machines to run in encrypted memory, helping protect them from memory scrape attacks from the hypervisor.

Data security architected into the processor provides a whole new approach to addressing security requirements. This is made possible by Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology available on AMD EPYC processors. Chip-level security can take on an increasingly important role in the securing of workloads, particularly when virtualized and cloud-based infrastructure is involved. [Ref 451 Research]

“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.” Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president and chief technical officer, Datacenter Ecosystems and Application Engineering, AMD

Reduced downtime for updates

Transactional updates offer more system consistency and a significant reduction in time needed for  updates. Thus, customers need to plan for shorter maintenance windows and get a better production uptime. This technology was introduced earlier in the SUSE CaaS Platform and used in several cloud stacks. With transactional updates, the running system is decoupled from the update process. As a result the installation of updates can be done while the system is in production, without impacting running processes. The activation of updates is done using a reboot to switch to the updated setup, with roll back capabilities to ensure a working setup is available within the maintenance window. Transactional updates are available as a tech preview with Service Pack 1.

Simplified installation with enhanced Modular+ functionality

The Unified Installer was introduced last year to give users a simplified way to engage with SUSE products.  Unified Installer provides a portal for the SUSE portfolio. Now, Modular+ capabilities are further enhanced to include more portfolio products – SUSE Manager, SUSE Enterprise Real Time and Point of Service products. You can search for a package and choose the set of packages that you want in the system.

Make it easy for architects

Underlying Common Code Base enables the IT team to work with one version of OS for a variety of platforms as compared to managing a version jungle. Having a single core for all SUSE products streamlines the management and maintenance processes and simplifies development.

Following are some of the SLE product family updates.

SLES for SAP Applications

  • Reduce complexity of clustered SAP HANA upgrades with a wizard that automates managing the cluster, updating the software and then reconnecting the cluster.
  • Protect SAP data in memory with enhanced Workload Memory Protection, which ensures that SAP transactional and analytics data remains in memory, protecting it from Linux kernel memory management.
  • Accelerate time to deploy SAP HANA clusters in the cloud (technical preview) with the fully automated installation and configuration of SAP HANA clusters with selected Hyperscalers.

 

SLE High Performance Computing (HPC platform for supporting AI/ML and analytics workloads)

  • Ease management and monitoring of your parallel computing environment with an updated and supported set of popular HPC tools and utilities, including tools for workload and cluster management.
  • Expand your x86-64 and Arm-based HPC cluster environment to the full range of hardware being used today for HPC – from low-cost to high-end supercomputers.
  • Increase resource efficiency and extreme scaling by offloading HPC processing to public and hybrid clouds, with updated SLE HPC images for both Microsoft Azure and AWS.

 

SLE Real Time

  • Strengthen reliability of time-sensitive mission-critical workloads through process and task prioritization.
  • Reduce latency and maximize application performance with virtualization support and tools to identify and resolve bottlenecks.
  • Increase predictability of critical business process response times through real-time scheduler classification and hierarchical priority scheme.

 SLES for IBM Z and LinuxONE

  • Exploit the latest IBM hardware, including z14 (M01-M05 and ZR1) and LinuxONE (LinuxONE Rockhopper II is equivalent to ZR1, LinuxONE Emperor II is equivalent to M01-M05).
  • Enable pervasive encryption Crypto Card updates for data at rest (encrypting data before being saved on storage) with z14 CEX6S crypto card support and for data in flight (encrypting data before being sent on a network) with kernel services exploiting z14 cryptography hardware.

 

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