Real Time Linux

If you don't get there first, your competition will. Eliminate latency and speed up response times with Real Time Linux.

To succeed in today's increasingly competitive global markets, you need to be able to respond quickly, deliver superior value, and carefully manage your costs.

Companies that can sense and respond more quickly to changing market conditions have a distinct advantage over those that can't. Agile enterprises that rely on advanced technologies to run their core business processes need hardware and software systems that are as fast and as responsive as they are.

Running your time-sensitive, mission-critical applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time reduces system latency and gives you the time advantage you need to make more money, or avoid further losses, ahead of your competitors.

Sense and respond more rapidly to market changes by reducing system latency.

Lower Latency With a Fully Preemptible Real-Time Kernel

SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time achieves these lower latencies with a fully preemptible real-time kernel, together with the ability to identify which specific application threads are the highest priority. User-specified processes are given priority to execute ahead of all others, even operating systems processes that were previously uninterruptible, like spinlocks and hardware and software interrupts.

Pinpoint Performance Bottlenecks

Often, improving responsiveness is challenging because you don't know what exactly is causing your systems to be slow, or where exactly it's happening. Our Real Time Linux solution helps you locate and identify potential performance bottlenecks that would otherwise keep you from maximizing your responsiveness, even system latencies that might be inherent in an application's architecture.

Optimize Data Center Performance

Using SUSE® Linux Enterprise Real Time together with Concurrent Computer Corporation's NightStar debugging and analysis tools allows you to non-intrusively analyze the run-time behavior of your time-sensitive applications. You can quickly and easily identify resource bottlenecks, targeting specific areas of code for improvement and optimizing of data center performance.

You can't make money if your doors aren't open. Real Time Linux keeps your business running, even under heavy system loads.

Enterprises today operate in a global economy with customers in many different time zones. To make the most money, they must be open for business and available to accept orders, wherever and whenever their customers are.

Applications that run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time are more reliable under heavy system loads than when they run on a general purpose operating system.

Novell's Real Time Linux solution ensures that your mission-critical applications perform optimally, irrespective of system loads. This greater reliability translates into higher availability of your mission-critical applications, ensuring that your systems are making money for you, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Increase your opportunities to make money by reducing downtime with more reliable systems.

Dealing With Uncertainty

Most software vendors provide specifications and minimum hardware requirements for running their applications optimally and delivering high quality of service. Data center managers use these guidelines, and their own judgment, to size their environments properly, balancing both performance and cost, and trying to plan for contingencies.

There are still times, however, when unexpectedly high loads or highly variable system demands can wreak havoc on an otherwise normal data center. Undesired resource contention can cause response times to increase. Systems can slow down to a crawl and application performance degrade to unacceptably poor levels. Or, applications can stop responding altogether and fail when systems under heavy load do not respond to the application's requests, and simply time out.

Reliable Performance—No Matter What

Real Time Linux from Novell ensures that your mission critical applications perform optimally, irrespective of system loads. This greater level of reliability increases the availability of your mission-critical applications, reducing downtime and ensuring that your systems are available to help you make money.

By shielding key hardware resources from extraneous threads and processes, allowing only the critical, high priority ones to run on them, you reduce uncertainty. High-priority processes don't experience resource starvation and continue to run, regardless of the overall load on the system.

You have to provide your customers service guarantees. Don't expect less from your IT systems. Deliver consistently with Real Time Linux.

Enterprises often have to provide their customers with service-level guarantees, and assurances that transactions processed on their behalf, complete on time as expected. And they have to consistently deliver high quality service, in spite of what may be going on around them.

To ensure predictable quality of service in an unpredictable world, you need hardware and software systems that are also predictable, and can deliver guaranteed performance, irrespective of the demands placed on them.

Novell's Real Time Linux solution helps companies whose livelihood depends on consistently delivering on their promises of timely, precise and reliable service.

Deliver consistently high QoS, even under the toughest conditions.

Shielding Key System Resources Improves Predictability

SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time uses the same shielding and reservation of key system resources for specified high-priority processes to greatly improve the predictability of your time-sensitive, mission-critical applications.

By allowing you to define which applications and processes are the most important ones, and then making sure that certain system resources are reserved for only those processes, you eliminate uncertainty and ensure that your time-sensitive applications perform as intended, irrespective of what is happening around them.

Improved Performance of Time Sensitive Applications

In some cases, predictability, or consistent performance, is even more important than pure speed, or absolute performance. More important than how fast something takes to complete, is making sure that it completes in the same amount of time, each and every time.

Certain mission critical systems are time-sensitive. In order for them to function as intended, they must start at a certain time, as well as finish at a certain time. High-performance calculators, risk-management algorithms, and computer simulations require precise synchronization and timely completion of intermediate computations to function properly. The satisfactory performance of the overall system depends on the precise coordination of the individual pieces.

You can get better predictability and better performance by running these kinds of time-sensitive applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time.

Meet your targets while cutting hardware costs in half. Have your cake and eat it too, with Real Time Linux.

Historically, enterprises that competed in highly unpredictable and volatile markets resorted to deploying highly over-provisioned systems in order to meet their quality of service targets and ensure both timely and consistent performance.

One way to solve the resource contention problem was to throw more hardware at it. By using enough hardware, you could minimize the chance that you would ever run out of system resources, thus helping to ensure your applications would perform as intended.

Meet your SLAs, while simultaneously increasing hardware utilization.

Our Real Time Linux solution enables you to run your time-sensitive, mission-critical applications predictably and reliably, even under heavy system loads. Now you can safely run your over-provisioned systems hotter, or at higher average utilization, effectively increasing capacity and/or lowering hardware costs.

More Hardware Is Not the Answer

Today, data center managers can no longer afford to solve their problems simply by adding more hardware. Data center managers are running out of physical space, and other resources. They simply do not have enough room and electricity to house, power, and cool the ever increasing number of systems necessary to ensure quality of service.

Higher Utilization With Fewer Servers

Because Real Time Linux enables you to run your time-sensitive, mission-critical applications predictably and reliably, even under heavy system loads, you can safely provision your hardware resources at a much higher average utilization rate. You still meet your service-level agreements, while reducing the total number of servers needed, thus saving you money.

For example, many trading and market data servers in capital markets firms are currently run at 5 to 10 percent average capacity in order to accommodate highly volatile trading volumes that can cause resource requirements to spike up to 15 times their daily average.

With our Real Time Linux solution, these same systems can be provisioned at 10 to 20 percent average utilization, allowing you to meet quality of service targets and service level agreements, while cutting hardware costs in half (or equivalently, doubling capacity).

Real Time Linux lowers your TCO and your blood pressure.

In the past, innovative firms that required high quality of service from their time-sensitive, mission-critical applications and needed a low latency platform to drive greater predictability, experimented with proprietary solutions, embedded real-time operating systems, and hardware-specific process control environments.

Today, Novell offers SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time, a flexible, affordable open source alternative to the rigid, costly proprietary options of the past.

Avoid vendor lock-in and redeploy scarce resources to core business activities.

The Advantages of Linux Without the Support and Maintenance Headaches

With the emergence, acceptance, and increased adoption of Linux, enterprises began to customize the Linux platform for their own enterprise real-time needs. But while open source licensing, transparent development models, and competition among Linux distributors were all attractive and helped drive down the acquisition costs of the Linux platform, enterprises found it increasingly difficult, time consuming, and costly to support and maintain their own custom Linux real-time solution.

Just because they could didn't mean they should. Not only was it difficult to keep pace with the latest technology innovations in the enterprise real-time space, it was also difficult to maintain the in-house expertise necessary to apply these innovations.

Open Source Support Vs. Vendor Lock-In

With Real Time Linux from Novell, you get all of the performance benefits of an enterprise Real Time platform, together with the benefits of an open source, enterprise Linux operating system.

Our Real Time Linux solution gives you the freedom to choose from a number of different support vendors, eliminating vendor lock-in. It also gives you access to Novell's integration of the open source community's latest real-time technologies into its enterprise desktop to data center platform.

Save money and strengthen your competitive advantage by redirecting scarce resources to your core business operations instead of continuing to maintain and support your own custom, low-latency platform.