SUSE LINUX

Get more done with the most versatile Linux platform

This server OS supports thousands of applications in virtual and cloud environments as well as industry-standard hardware.

Designed to deliver essential data center services with commodity off-the-shelf IT resources, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the versatile Linux platform that pleases both business users and IT managers. This Linux server OS supports thousands of third-party ISV applications—and enables them to run in physical, virtual and cloud environments.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server also interoperates with two other operating systems often used in today’s data centers, Windows and UNIX. Optional extensions deliver advanced functionality. As a result, you can integrate SUSE Linux Enterprise Server seamlessly into mixed IT infrastructures, continue to run your existing applications and add new capabilities as your business needs change.

Runs Almost Every Application

Why do more than 13,000 businesses worldwide use SUSE Linux Enterprise Server? Our versatile Linux server OS supports more than 6,000 third-party ISV applications. That’s more than double what Red Hat offers, and our list of supported software keeps growing.

Certified and supported software for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server includes everything from mission-critical databases, e-commerce applications and ERP systems, to e-mail, file and print servers and web servers. Today, 75 percent of all SAP applications for Linux run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Additionally, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server supports industry-standard development and runtime environments, such as Java and .NET. With the optional Mono Extension, you can run existing Microsoft .NET-based server applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or build new .NET applications to run on Linux.

Runs on Nearly Every Processor and Device

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is right at home in today’s data centers, which house a wide variety of systems and platforms. Most leading hardware vendors support our Linux server OS, so you can save money by using your existing physical servers or new, low-cost commodity hardware.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is supported on these five processor architectures:

  • x86 (32-bit)
  • x86_64 (64-bit)
  • Itanium (Itanium II or newer)
  • IBM POWER
  • IBM z/Architecture (64-bit)

 

With the introduction of Service Pack 1, our enterprise Linux server OS supports more than 500 additional processors, chipsets, storage systems and networking devices. This ensures you can run Linux in any data center and get more utilization out of the low-cost, commercial hardware you already own.

For a complete list of certified hardware for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (all versions), please visit www.novell.com/partnerguide.

Supports Physical, Virtual and Cloud Environments

To get more from their existing resources and achieve greater business agility, organizations increasingly are moving workloads to virtual environments and the cloud. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the flexible operating platform for physical, virtual and cloud computing that’s supported by today’s leading technology vendors.

Novell has partnered with both Microsoft and VMware to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on each company’s hypervisor technology (Hyper-V and vSphere respectively). As a result, you can count on consistent performance and streamlined support when you use SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Hyper-V or vSphere. Additionally, both Microsoft and VMware exclusively recommend SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to their customers who run Linux servers.

Looking for a powerful yet affordable way to virtualize workloads? Every subscription to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server includes commercial support for Xen and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). More and more enterprises are using these open source hypervisor technologies to create and deploy their virtual infrastructure.

Still debating whether to move workloads and services to the cloud? SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is no stranger to cloud computing. It includes tools for creating purpose-built operating system images along with cloud-ready workloads and appliances. In fact, well-known public cloud infrastructures, like Amazon EC2, offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on-demand.

Interoperates with Windows and UNIX

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server interoperates with two operating platforms widely used in today’s data centers: Windows and UNIX. Since 2006, Novell and Microsoft have worked together to improve interoperability between Linux and Windows in the areas of identity federation, cross-platform systems management and, especially, cross-platform virtualization.

As a result of this collaboration, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server supports Windows Server 2008 guest operating systems in paravirtualized Xen environments. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server also is supported as a guest operating system in “enlightened” Hyper-V virtual environments. In fact, Microsoft endorses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to its customers who run Linux.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server adheres to the Portable Operating System Interface for UNIX, a family of specifications and standards for user and software interfaces to an operating system. Because our Linux platform is POSIX-compliant, it is compatible with other POSIX-compliant UNIX platforms, such as Solaris, AIX and HP-UX.

Extensions Add Even More Capabilities

Novell also offers modular extensions that supply advanced capabilities for supporting your infrastructure. And because these extensions are optional, you pay only for the functionality your business needs.

Extensions for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server include:

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension: This affordable, integrated suite of open source technologies enables you to deploy highly available physical and virtual Linux clusters. Used with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, it helps maintain business continuity, protect data integrity and reduce unplanned downtime.
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension: This Linux application server is the only one that can host native .NET applications. The Mono runtime, libraries and tools deliver new cross-platform capabilities to your existing .NET environment, improving utilization of existing .NET development resources and your investments in Linux.
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time Extension: This extension turns the general-purpose Linux operating system into a fully supported, real-time operating system. It reduces the latency of time-sensitive mission-critical applications while increasing their predictability and reliability.

Run mission-critical workloads reliably and securely

Count on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to handle mission-critical workloads and protect your applications, systems and data.

Today, your organization demands more from its IT resources, and more systems and applications are considered mission critical. Web services, e-commerce sites and securities-trading applications are just as critical as your online data processing, database and ERP systems. For your IT team, the pressure to ensure mission-critical services are continuously available while keeping risk in check is greater than ever.

Novell has designed SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to process all types of workloads, especially the mission-critical, while also providing the highest availability in its class. It supports productivity and reduces risk by helping your business to access critical systems, applications, networks and data continuously and securely.

Additionally, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server comes with advanced security capabilities that help you protect your systems from attacks, malicious applications and viruses.

Delivering the Best Uptime in Its Class

The most fundamental measurement of reliability is downtime (both planned and unplanned). In a recent survey conducted by the Information Technology Intelligence Corporation, respondents reported SUSE Linux Enterprise Server exhibited on average 17.4 minutes of unplanned downtime per server per year. Compare this with 35.4 minutes for Oracle Solaris, 67.2 minutes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and 145.2 minutes for Windows Server 2008.

The same study found that the average time to patch a server (planned downtime) with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was 15 minutes, versus 31 minutes for Solaris, 27 minutes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and 32 minutes for Windows Server 2008. By minimizing both planned and unplanned downtime with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, your business gains more access to the applications, systems and data it depends on to generate revenues and stay competitive.

Continuously Improving High Availability

For customers who require 99.999 percent reliability, Novell offers Linux clustering with SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension. This suite of open source technologies automates application failover and data recovery, and delivers all of the essential capabilities for the monitoring and messaging management of clustered resources. With SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, you can maintain business continuity, protect data integrity and virtually eliminate unplanned downtime for your mission-critical Linux workloads. Best of all, it’s more affordable than any competing third-party solution.

Find out more about SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension.

Novell is committed to continuously integrating more reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) capabilities into SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Swap over network file system (NFS) helps protect your systems against application restarts and costly downtime. With control groups, you can assign specific hardware resources to applications, processes and threads. Such precise control helps maximize system performance, especially for mission-critical applications.

In addition, the latest operating system update, Service Pack 1 (SP1), includes features that boost RAS capabilities even more. Support for RAID 6 and RAID 10 offers increased data redundancy, and enhanced MPIO hardware support expands multipath options.

Protecting Your Enterprise with Advanced Security

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is not only perfect for processing mission-critical workloads and delivering business services. It also protects your intellectual property–the lifeblood of your business–with advanced, built-in security capabilities.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server ships with AppArmor®, an effective and easy-to-use security system developed by Novell. AppArmor proactively protects the operating system and applications from external or internal threats–even zero-day attacks–by enforcing secure behavior and preventing unknown application flaws from being exploited.

AppArmor security policies completely define what system resources individual applications can access, and with what privileges. Such oversight is critical today, as more people access your resources via the Internet and more workloads run in virtual environments and the cloud. AppArmor includes default policies so you can successfully deploy security policies for complex applications in just a few hours.

When it comes to enterprise Linux security, AppArmor is just the beginning. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server also provides a true firewall that protects your resources from internal and external attacks. This “stateful” firewall technology lets you separate networks and control which packets pass through any network interface.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server also supports the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) standard for authenticating common hardware devices. Our comprehensive, enterprise-class security capabilities include certificate creation and management, VPN, encryption, authentication, access control lists and intrusion detection.

Save time and money, now and in the future

Get more from your existing resources. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is affordable and includes money-saving features and time-saving tools.

As your business grows, you acquire additional technologies to manage, which adds complexity to your infrastructure. Alongside these acquisitions are systems and platforms that have run in your data centers for years. You continue to support these older technologies because they run business services and mission-critical applications your people rely on. On top of that, as IT budgets shrink, you’re asked to squeeze more from your existing hardware resources.

To control costs, reduce complexity and ensure you get the most from your IT investments for years to come, Novell offers SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. This open source platform enables a continuous stream of innovation and encourages competition, which reduces risk. The center of a vibrant technology ecosystem, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server runs on five popular processor architectures, most of them low-cost, and supports multiple open source and third-party virtualization platforms.

With SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, you not only get more from the systems you already own, but also gain greater efficiencies from server consolidation. And because SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the least expensive operating system on the market for creating and deploying virtual environments, you save even more. You can also use SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a cost-effective guest operating system. With one subscription, you can run as many virtual instances as you want on a single physical server.

Although SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a versatile and powerful addition to your mission-critical IT operations, it helps reduce complexity. The platform comes with powerful, easy-to-use tools that simplify installation, configuration, management and application development–even in the largest and most complex data centers.

Run Linux on Cost-effective Hardware

Are you under pressure to get more from your current systems and achieve enterprise-class performance and reliability—even from budget-friendly, industry-standard commodity hardware? Novell understands and has designed SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to run on multiple platforms. Now you can match your workloads with the hardware best suited for the job so you can avoid expensive over-provisioning.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server runs on these five processor architectures:

  • x86 (32-bit)
  • x86_64 (64-bit)
  • Itanium (Itanium II or newer)
  • IBM POWER
  • IBM z/Architecture (64-bit)

 

With the release of Service Pack 1 (SP1), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server supports more than 500 additional processors, chipsets, storage systems and networking devices. Now you can get more utilization from the hardware you already own, including less costly x86 servers.

Use the Platform Optimized for All Major Third-party Hypervisors

Because enterprises are increasingly moving workloads to virtual and cloud environments, Novell has optimized SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for all major virtualization hypervisors and cloud platforms. With virtualization, you can consolidate workloads onto fewer physical servers. As a result, you get more from your underutilized systems and lower the costs of acquiring and maintaining hardware. Additionally, consolidation saves space in the data center and keeps power and cooling costs down.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the perfect guest operating system for virtual servers created with hypervisor technologies from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is optimized to deliver superior performance with VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. It’s also the most affordable operating system to use in these virtual environments. You can run an unlimited number of guest operating systems on one physical server for the cost of a single SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription.

Take Advantage of Built-in Virtualization Capabilities

Increased performance and efficiency doesn’t have to empty your wallet or burden your IT team with administration nightmares. Each SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription includes support for all the leading open source hypervisor technologies. It ships with Xen, the most widely used open source virtualization hypervisor, and Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), an emerging open source technology. To make life easier on your IT staff, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server includes graphical and command-line tools that dramatically simplify installing, configuring and managing your virtualized environments.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the perfect host operating system for running virtual Windows workloads. With optional paravirtualized drivers in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack, you can consolidate Windows applications and run them with near-native performance on virtualized Linux servers.

SP1 includes the latest Xen 4.0 hypervisor, which provides better performance, especially for I/O intensive workloads. It also includes Linux integration components for Hyper-V. Also, new paravirtualized drivers for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 guests are available with the latest SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack.

No matter which virtualization hypervisor you use, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is your best choice for running virtual Linux services.

Save Time with Powerful Administration and Development Tools

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server also comes with administration and development tools that make it simpler for your staff to install, configure and support Linux in your data center. Easy to use, and with the power to handle large numbers of systems, these tools cut maintenance costs and save time, freeing your staff to focus on adding more value to your business.

These tools include:

  • ZYpp: Quickly manage package installations and resolve dependencies with the fastest update stack available on any enterprise Linux distribution.
  • YaST®, AutoYaST and WebYaST: YaST offers a user-friendly environment for server installation, configuration and management. AutoYaST extends these capabilities by enabling automated remote systems configuration and mass deployment, while WebYaST offers the functionality of YaST through a web browser.
  • Subscription Management Tool (SMT): Centrally manage software updates on a per-system basis and track your entitlements across large deployments–all within your firewall.
  • Software development kit (SDK): The comprehensive SDK included with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server enables you to create applications quickly and effectively. It provides developers with powerful open source programming languages, integrated development environments, libraries, compilers, debuggers and simulators.

 

Protect Your Investment

Because it’s designed for interoperability and optimized for virtual and cloud environments, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server paves the way for your future growth. This versatile and flexible platform enables you to move easily from older servers to new, more powerful systems when they become available or when your business needs change. It also enables you to move mission-critical workloads and business services from physical to virtual and cloud environments.

Compared with traditional UNIX, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a much more cost-effective platform. Not only can you run Linux on x86 systems, which are much lower in cost compared with RISC-based architectures such as SPARC, but you can also save a bundle in software licenses.

Isn’t it time you considered an open platform with transparent source code to reduce your risk and protect your IT investments? The open source model of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server supports continuous innovation and minimizes the risk of single-vendor lock-in, so you’re never at the mercy of one technology provider.

Do more with new, advanced features

With Service Pack 1, you get improved reliability, availability and serviceability and virtualization along with support for more third-party hardware.

 

Are you considering Novell SUSE Linux™ software for your organizaton? Let the Kifinti Solutions expert team help you.We can leverage our many successful implementations to help make your project a success.  Ask about a free product evaluation.