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Provide Mission-Critical Services to Your Customers on Physical, Virtual, or Cloud Platforms

On 19 May, Novell announced the upcoming availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 1. So, as a Novell partner, how does this new release help your business? How can you drive increased revenue and profit with this new release?

1. Enable customers’ success in physical, virtual and cloud environments – This newest release includes the latest open source technologies that will help your customers cost-effectively run their most critical applications on any platform. Enhancing your status as “trusted advisor” in virtualization and cloud computing, SP1 offers:

• Broadest virtualization support: updated Xen hypervisor with better I/O performance, support for KVM, Linux Integration Components with Hyper-V and continued support for ESX.
• Support for virtualization-aware hardware: take advantage of new hardware that can bypass the hypervisor and communicate directly with network or storage devices, achieving significant performance gains, especially for I/O intensive workloads.
• Tailored operating platform: use JeOS (Just Enough Operating System) -- a slimmed down version of SUSE Linux Enterprise -- to provide only the functionality needed; tailor customers’ systems for their data center or create virtual appliances for deploying workloads with simplicity and speed.
• Unlimited virtual server instances: continue to provide support for unlimited Xen virtual server instances with a single physical server subscription.

2. Confidently move mission-critical workloads from UNIX to Linux - SP1 delivers more of the mission-critical features historically provided with UNIX systems but on industry-standard x86 hardware, enhancing your ability to migrate mission-critical applications to robust, cost-effective Linux platforms. SP1 offers better performance, scalability, security and reliability by providing:

• Support for newest processors: support the latest Intel Xeon 7500 and 5600 processors, as well as AMD Opteron 6000 series processors, exposing many of the mission-critical features found with RISC-based hardware – mca recovery, improved MPIO hardware support, hot add of CPU and memory, up to 4096 CPUs, 64 TB of RAM and 8EB file sizes.
• Mission-critical computing: better performance, scalability, security and reliability through an improved scheduler, support for new CPU floating point and cryptographic features, improved processor and memory and storage scalability.
• Enhanced high-availability solution: clustering advances such as support for metro area clusters, simple node recovery with ReaR - the leading open source disaster recovery framework - and new administrative tools including a cluster simulator and web-based GUI.

3. Deploy new applications quickly and securely - With more than 5,000 certified ISV applications, SUSE Linux Enterprise has over twice that of the next closest enterprise Linux distribution provider. Expanded hardware support lets you run these applications on the platform best suited for those workloads – be it a virtual appliance, x86 server, mainframe, virtual server, cloud. SP1 lets you get these applications deployed faster through:

• Faster access to third-party applications: Partner Linux Driver program enables component, system and software vendors to integrate their third-party technology more quickly, enabling you to more easily execute migration services.
• Improved interoperability: optimize existing IT infrastructure through improved support for IPv6 with NFS 4.1, Samba 3.4 and support for Windows 7 domains; WebYaST, a web-based tool, lets you manage systems – including appliances – and supports over 500 new CPUs, chipsets, networking and storage devices.
• New technology on the desktop: improved audio and Bluetooth support, latest versions of FireFox, OpenOffice.org, and Evolution, including MAPI enhancements for improved interoperability with Microsoft Exchange.
• Robust appliance program: SUSE Studio and the Novell Appliance Program lets ISV and integration partners build workloads that are intelligently managed to deliver IT services efficiently and cost effectively.

In addition to these benefits, Novell is also implementing more flexible support options with SP1 that will allow customers to remain on older package releases during the product's life cycle, and will significantly lower the hurdle to deploy upcoming service packs. While current releases deliver the most value with proactive maintenance updates and patches, for customers that place a premium on stability, this program delivers superior control and flexibility by allowing them to decide when and how to upgrade.

If you are implementing server consolidation, UNIX migration, or other data center modernization strategies for your customers, you will undoubtedly find the enhancements in SP1 to be beneficial for your customers.

For more information on how this exciting new release will help you identify new sales opportunities in your accounts and offer value-added services to generate more data center revenues, please see the full press release or go to our website.