SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 2 is Generally Available

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP2 is designed to help organizations further accelerate innovation, gain competitive advantage and improve productivity.

“SUSE solutions, including SUSE Linux Enterprise, are designed for IT transformation,” Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE president of engineering and innovation. “Customers stake their businesses on their IT infrastructure and we stake our business on their success. With SUSE and using true open source software, they can simplify their existing environments and ease the transformation that will allow them to take advantage of modern computing as they accelerate innovation in their businesses.”

In today’s IT world of continuous change, organizations are looking to simplify and optimize existing IT environments. They want to bring applications and data into modern computing with an aim to scale the business as the market opportunity grows. These may seem disparate goals. However, when designed right they form the three pillars of an enterprise platform.

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 launched two years ago was built with exactly these goals in mind. Each year the service packs incrementally add to that vision while incorporating new functionality requests from customers and a steady stream of inputs from users across the globe. Here are highlights of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP2.

Cloud

• Make it easier to benefit from hyperscalers with updated cloud images for Alibaba, Azure, AWS, Google, IBM, and Oracle. Cloud images are available – optimized and ready to run. So, you can run them right-away at optimized start point.
• You can deploy large-scale HPC systems in AWS. Support is provided for Elastic Fabric Adapter and Graviton2 CPU (Arm based).

Security

• Greater security for federal government and public sector organizations as well as others running high-security environments with FIPS 140-2 certification-ready packages.
• Ensure protection against outsider threats for IBM Z installations with support for IBM Secure Execution and Secure Boot.
• Support for a complete and secure offline installation for air-gapped deployments, which are typical for military and healthcare environments.
• Protect data at rest without additional software cost using cryptctl. Local and Remote disk encryption can be setup for all on-premises, cloud and hybrid installations along with  enterprise key management KMIP standard.

Business Continuity

• Increase Linux system uptime by up to 12 months while maintaining highest security standards with SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching, now also available for IBM Z and LinuxONE.

Michael Desens, vice president of offering management, IBM Z and LinuxONE, IBM, said, “Today’s announcement of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP2 adds support for new capabilities of IBM z15 and LinuxONE III including IBM Secure Execution for Linux – a Trusted Execution Environment that is designed to run large numbers of workloads in full isolation at scale, with enterprise-grade features engineered to protect sensitive data from internal and external threats across the hybrid cloud environment. SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP2 also includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching for IBM Z and LinuxONE, which can help to maximize system uptime and availability for mission-critical systems.”

On-prem deployments

• Improvements for on-premises deployments and hardware support with an up-to-2x compute scalability increase by enabling the latest hardware generation. SUSE Linux Enterprise supports the latest hardware, including Fujitsu A64FX, Intel and the upcoming next-generation AMD EPYC™ processor.
• Improved support for localization needs with improved Chinese language support for installation and documentation.

HPC Environments

• Further improved support for High Performance Computing. Slurm is supported, a centralized workload manager for HPC clusters with plugin support and a REST API, used by about 60% of TOP500 supercomputers.

SAP Environments

• Easier migration of SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA services to cloud and hybrid implementations with automated installation and configuration of the complete software stack, optimized for performance and resilience. Integrators can add SAP S/4HANA migration sizing data to deployment scripts for automatic deployment in just a few clicks. SAP Basis Administrators can also proactively manage SAP systems with new monitoring and visualization of server, cluster and SAP applications data.

SUSE also collaborated with Microsoft to develop a solution to collect and graphically display both server and SAP-specific operational data to proactively identify potential problems. John Gossman, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft Corp., said, “SUSE and Microsoft have a long-standing commitment to ensuring smooth and reliable implementations of SAP systems. Microsoft Azure has standardized on SUSE’s Pacemaker Monitoring Exporter and is pleased to see this capability supported in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP2.”

DevOps, Open Source Adoption

• Achieve faster migration from the openSUSE Leap community distribution to supported SUSE Linux Enterprise with SP2 binaries made available on openSUSE Leap: differences reduced by about 75%. Less risk leads to less administrative effort.
• Enable your DevOps teams with support for automation, project builds and message-oriented middleware, combined with management and monitoring features such as RabbitMQ, Prometheus and Maven.
• Reduce database licensing costs by up to 80% by migrating from proprietary traditional databases towards open source. New features and performance improvements are enabled with support for PostgreSQL 12 and MariaDB 10.4.

AI/ML, Edge

• Greater operational efficiency and anytime/anywhere access to data through workflow automation and expanded hypervisor support from NVIDIA, putting more tools into the hands of data scientists and IT for managing artificial intelligence (AI) and edge workloads.
• Support for NVIDIA Tegra X1 and Tegra X2 provide new options for data scientists.
• Support for the newest Raspberry Pi 4 device enables reduced energy and heat dissipation while improving the installation process.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2 is available on the x86-64, Arm, IBM POWER, IBM Z and LinuxONE hardware architectures.

Learn more:

• Documentation
• Release Notes
• Download Link
• Blogs
  • What’s new for High Performance Computing in SLES 15 SP2
  • What’s new in SUSE Linux Enterprise for Arm 15 SP2
  • Artificial Intelligence – will 2020 be the year the momentum stalls?

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