Alibaba Cloud, founded in 2009, is a global leader in cloud computing and artificial intelligence, excelling in areas such as computing, storage, networking, database, big data analytics, security, and cloud-native solutions. Notably, it has developed one of the world’s most powerful Al model family: the Tongi models, which include Qwen and Wan. Alibaba Cloud’s trusted services have been utilized by more than 4 million enterprises, developers, and government organizations in more than 200 countries and regions. In January 2017, it became the official Worldwide Cloud Services Partner of the Olympic Games.
At-a-Glance
The global cloud computing leader Alibaba Cloud collaborates with SUSE to provide enterprise-grade Linux products — SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications. This partnership enables Alibaba Cloud to meet enterprise demands for secure SAP deployments on public clouds. Many enterprises, including large-scale financial, insurance and retail organizations, now use SUSE products on Alibaba Cloud to build their public cloud foundations.
Managing challenges in cloud environments
As a leading global cloud provider, Alibaba Cloud offers highly available, scalable and redundant underlying infrastructure to ensure business continuity, stability and rapid scalability.
However, even robust cloud infrastructures need stable and reliable operating systems. Enterprises migrating to the cloud often encounter familiar challenges, such as choosing a stable, secure operating system. Open source systems risk sudden discontinuation and lack of technical support, while subscription-based systems may have short lifecycle support and unpredictable price increases.
Enterprise users also have higher expectations for operating systems when deploying SAP applications, especially given the demanding memory management requirements of SAP’s HANA architecture. Businesses require systems with zero downtime, high elasticity and additional safeguards specifically for SAP.
Alibaba Cloud recognizes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server’s strong reputation for long-term enterprise-level service, serving leading enterprises globally. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications is specifically optimized and certified by SAP, dominating this market segment. Therefore, Alibaba Cloud decided to integrate SUSE solutions to help users manage IT systems and deploy critical business applications more effectively.
“Today’s users not only focus on the technical features of products but also increasingly value timely and professional after-sales support services. We have learned that SUSE has a large number of successful implementation cases and service experience in China. Their service system can complement Alibaba Cloud to provide users with a better product experience.”
Building the foundation for enterprise cloud innovation
Extended lifecycle support ensures continuous business operations
The continuity and stability of the operating system are among the core concerns for enterprises when choosing critical business systems. While building a reliable cloud platform, Alibaba Cloud also provides users with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, known for its stable service, supporting users in creating reliable cloud-based business systems.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications both have ultra-long product lifecycles — up to 13 years, including 10 years of standard support and three years of extended support. With SUSE Linux Enterprise Server’s stable support, enterprises do not need to frequently upgrade their systems or redeploy applications, reducing potential risks and burdens and ensuring continuous and stable operation of their businesses. For industries such as finance, manufacturing, transportation and energy, a long-term stable system is the basic guarantee for conducting business.
Alibaba Cloud believes that the long lifecycle and stable operation of SUSE products align perfectly with Alibaba Cloud’s philosophy of providing reliable services to users. Through the combination of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server system and the cloud platform’s technical architecture, Alibaba Cloud is confident in assisting users in building reliable cloud-based business systems.
High-level supply chain security certifications protect enterprises
System security is another focus for enterprises. Both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications have achieved internationally recognized high-level software supply chain security certifications — Common Criteria (CC) EAL4+ and FIPS 140-2. These certifications ensure that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server’s software supply chain has undergone rigorous security reviews, ensuring that all updates, patches and software components come from trusted sources, preventing supply chain contamination. At the same time, code signing and integrity verification ensure that system updates do not introduce security vulnerabilities or backdoors. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server meets the stringent security standards of industries such as finance and telecommunications, ensuring the security of critical IT infrastructure.
In recent years, software supply chain intrusion incidents have been on the rise, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, with its strict supply chain security standards, helps users safeguard their security at the operating system level. The Alibaba Cloud team has noticed that enterprise users, when deploying critical business systems, prioritize systems with higher security standards like SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. This approach meets both the enterprise’s own security needs and the requirements of national mandatory standards such as network security level classification and information security graded protection.
Integrated high availability functions mitigate single-point failures
Alibaba Cloud provides users with application high availability services, using a multilayer disaster recovery architecture to help users improve application-layer stability. The disaster recovery capabilities and high availability of the application layer also require the underlying infrastructure layer (operating system) to have corresponding capabilities to complement it. Effective coordination between the two is necessary to achieve uninterrupted business operation.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications have built-in high availability (HA) features that have been fully tested and optimized, eliminating the compatibility risks associated with users having to install this feature separately. Alibaba Cloud users can easily build high availability clusters using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server HA. When a single server encounters a failure, the business can quickly and automatically switch to a backup node, avoiding prolonged downtime.
Alibaba Cloud believes that achieving disaster recovery capabilities requires support from multi-layered technical capabilities, among which the operating system plays an important role. Through the integration of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Alibaba Cloud’s highavailability services, enterprises can switch between primary and backup servers and distribute business traffic within seconds, ensuring smooth business operations and minimizing the risk of service disruptions.
Native snapshot rollback for unexpected risks
SUSE’s pursuit of system stability and security goes beyond this. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server also has a key feature: rollback capability based on the btrfs file system. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server uses btrfs as the default root file system, providing modern features such as automatic health detection, system snapshots and data verification, offering enterprise-grade users data integrity protection and system recovery capabilities.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server can automatically create system snapshots before users perform software updates, configuration changes and patch installations, and it enables atomic updates. If users make changes, the system will only apply the changes after the update is completely successful. If the update fails or problems occur, the system will automatically detect health issues and automatically roll back to the previous normal state, preventing the system from becoming unusable.
Officially certified by SAP, preferred by 70% of enterprise users
More and more enterprises are choosing to deploy SAP applications in the public cloud to gain greater business flexibility. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications is an operating system specifically optimized for SAP applications. It is officially certified by SAP and is suitable for SAP HANA, SAP NetWeaver and SAP S/4HANA solutions. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications holds a market-leading position. Data shows that among enterprises using Linux to deploy SAP, 70% have chosen SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications inherits all the features of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and is specifically optimized for SAP: automating SAP deployment and migration to accelerate deployment progress; optimizing large-scale memory calls to significantly improve SAP HANA performance and stability; further enhancing system high availability to support automatic failover of SAP services; and collaborating with SAP to develop the proprietary management tool Trento for comprehensive monitoring and management of system status, improving the availability of SAP applications.
Since its launch on the Alibaba Cloud platform, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications has attracted the attention of domestic SAP users. Currently, large enterprises in the finance, insurance and retail industries are using this product to deploy SAP, and the number is continuously increasing. Alibaba Cloud states that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications meets the growing business needs of users, allowing domestic enterprises to enjoy industry best practices simultaneously.
Localized technical support by expert teams
Excellent localized service capabilities are also an important reason why Alibaba Cloud chose to partner with SUSE. SUSE has a comprehensive service, support and R&D team in China, providing online and offline service channels. In addition to common technical support, SUSE can also provide users with services such as architecture design, feasibility testing, deployment support and training, meeting the diverse needs of users. The combination of the Alibaba Cloud support system and the SUSE service system can meet users’ multi-dimensional needs, from basic technical consulting to complex system architecture design.
Reliable enterprise-grade product ecosystem for multi-scenario needs
An excellent product can solve some of the user’s problems; a reliable system can build a stable and secure IT environment. In addition to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications, SUSE also provides more enterprise-grade products to help users address IT challenges.
SUSE Multi-Linux Support provides unified update and patch support for different versions of Linux, perfectly supporting CentOS and RHEL systems, significantly reducing the management costs of heterogeneous Linux environments. SUSE Multi-Linux Manager can centrally manage different versions of Linux systems in the cloud and on-premises, enabling real-time monitoring and automated operation and maintenance, improving IT management efficiency. SUSE Rancher Prime is a popular large-scale container cluster management platform that helps enterprises deploy, run and manage containerized workloads in hybrid environments. It integrates industry-leading container observability and security and provides long-term lifecycle support.
Choosing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the critical business operating system, using SUSE Multi-Linux Support and SUSE Multi-Linux Manager to uniformly support and manage multiple Linux environments, and deploying and managing large-scale container clusters with SUSE Rancher Prime, these components combine to build a solid and secure technology foundation.
What’s next for Alibaba Cloud?
With the increasing scale of enterprise cloud adoption, deeper application integration and the widespread use of cloud native technologies, users need to manage more complex hybrid IT environments. This requires cloud computing companies to provide reliable and market-proven enterprise-grade solutions to help users improve multi-Linux management efficiency and reduce the difficulty of managing large-scale container clusters.
To meet user needs, Alibaba Cloud may consider expanding its cooperation with SUSE to provide users with enterprise-grade products including SUSE Multi-Linux Support, SUSE Multi-Linux Manager and SUSE Rancher Prime, helping users achieve unified technical support across Linux distributions, one-stop management of multiple Linux systems, and large-scale container cluster management.