SUSE Studio 1.2 Accelerates Application Deployments to Cloud and Mainframe Environments

Guest Post by Brett H. Waldman

With the recent acquisition of Novell by Attachmate, there has been some uncertainty around the future of the SUSE Appliance Program. However, with today’s announcement of SUSE Studio v1.2, the newly formed SUSE group has put that uncertainty to rest. The updated version of SUSE Studio will be available in two editions -Standard Edition which is primarily targeted towards ISVs and Advanced Edition which is primarily for enterprise organizations. One of the new features that is only included in Advanced Edition is the support for System Z. SUSE Enterprise Linux has long been the market leading Linux on System Z, so it is no surprise that customers have been clamoring for such a feature.

Other updates that are included in both versions of the products include 1-click deployment to Amazon EC2, enhanced versioning, rebuilding and changelog, and better integration with other SUSE products like SUSE Manager and Sentinel Log Manager.

IDC believes software appliances can play a key role in building out cloud deployments. This is why IDC forecasts the packaged software appliance market to grow to $3.7 billion by 2014. The ability to create and maintain one piece of software and deploy anywhere is an essential piece to automating your private, public and hybrid cloud deployments. And now with SUSE Studio’s support for System Z, enterprises can use one tool for version control across x86, public cloud and System Z deployments reducing the overhead associated with managing a heterogeneous environment.