In order to help our customers assure their cluster configurations are running at peak performance, SUSE has teamed with the high availability experts at LINBIT to offer a cluster stack health check service.

The LINBIT Cluster Stack Health Check is an extensive check-up for Linux high availability clustering solutions, such as the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension. LINBIT's Professional Services provides a thorough examination of an organization's cluster stack and a detailed best practice report with recommended enhancements to help customers get the most from their high availability cluster configurations.

Are your clusters running at peak performance, particularly the mission critical components?  SUSE customers with a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription can get LINBIT's highly-effective Cluster Stack Health Check for a special price until December 31, 2011.  Click here for more information.

These days it’s hard to get excited about anything short of the most innovative solutions. Still, it takes time and effort to stay on top of it all and then be prepared to sell it internally to your organization. Linux, largely due to its roots in the open source community, consistently leads the market with rapid innovation and feature-rich development.

As a result of the past economic challenges, most recent innovations have focused on impacting the bottom line—smart ways to cut costs, increase efficiency, and generally do more with less.  Here are five areas of innovation we see making a difference now.

1. Virtualization – The birth of virtualization enabled enterprises to significantly reduce the risks and challenges of computing across multiple environments, while granting you secure and compliant access. While the associated cost savings and increased flexibility have changed the IT landscape, more recent innovations in identity, security and compliance are making your intelligent workload management a simpler reality.

2. Hardware advances — Chipset manufacturers like IBM (Systems E and Systems P environments), AMD and Intel (x86 and x86-64) have launched recent releases that are translating into great strides in system performance, particularly for businesses with large servers. The Intel® Xeon® Processor 7500 Series, for example, is now providing a 5 to 8x performance gain, creating great flexibility for enterprises looking to scale.

3. Patching methodologies – A bug used to force your hand, but patching updates just got a lot more user-friendly. Want to update only what’s broken? With new solutions that create more flexibility and less downtime, fixing a bug doesn’t need to cost you unnecessary time and money.

4. High availability extensions – Disaster recovery isn’t a scary or costly exercise anymore. For example, you can now affordably manage clusters spread across multiple data centers within a metropolitan area, providing high availability for your most mission-critical applications. Create a stretch cluster in your city, and if there’s a power outage or disaster, your applications are protected and can be brought online in another local data center. Other solutions allow you to restore an individual server that’s not part of a cluster, providing real-world business continuity.

5. Support – While it may not come in a box or a download, support stands strong as an innovation that’s making a difference in the marketplace. With everyone consuming the same code, the best technology remains important, but the difference in user experience lies with the relationships you form from the time you first install. The most innovative companies are committed to nurturing their relationship with you and placing a top priority on supporting the best user experience with Linux.

What did we miss?  Want to learn more about how Linux can help you innovate?  Register to attend a Linux Day near you.