SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP1 Enhances Support for HPC Computing

SUSE has updated its SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 operating system and its SUSE Manager infrastructure management platform with a wide range of new features and improvements designed to simplify and streamline IT for business IT systems.

The company’s latest Linux operating system is SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 1, which adds enhanced support for high performance computing (HPC) workloads, improved hardware-based security and easier methods to move a business from the open source community-based version of SUSE Linux to the enterprise-supported version.

The other new releases, SUSE Manager 4 and SUSE Manager for Retail 4, bring new features to the company’s infrastructure management platforms, including improvements to further reduce complexity and improve control of enterprise IT operations.

For the open-source vendor, the updated products offer more ways to attract new customers who are looking to strengthen and streamline their IT systems using open source technologies, tools, design practices and thinking, Mike Kerr, SUSE’s director of North American channels and alliances, told Channel Futures. SUSE continues to work on integrating important components that customers desire over the next five years, including containers as a service and as a platform, multicloud platforms and software defined storage, he said.

“It also opens us up to new partners that are not already involved in open-source software to have products that are easy to work with and that feature compliance and expandability,” said Kerr. “We are offering as complete a product solution offering as there is in the marketplace and that’s critically important for partners because when they invest their business with us, we need to show them that we stay at the forefront of the industry.”

To enhance support for HPC workloads by business users, SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 1 bumps up its included SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Arm 15 component by doubling the number of supported system-on-a-chip (SoC) processor options, broadening support for storage and industrial automation applications on 64-bit Arm server and internet-of-things devices, the company said.

SUSE says the easier transition from community Linux versions to the enterprise versions can now be done using just a few clicks within the new SP1 version, giving businesses and developers more flexibility in deciding on the right operating system for their use.

Other improvements in the new SP1 version include better hardware-based security with full support for AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology, which enables guest virtual machines to run in encrypted memory, helping to protect them from memory scrape attacks from the hypervisor. SP1 also supports AMD Secure Memory Encryption (SME), which uses a single key to encrypt system memory.

Workloads using Intel Optane DC persistent memory and second-generation Intel Xeon scalable processors also get new optimizations under SP1, while users also should expect, SUSE says, to see significant reductions in the time it takes to get software maintenance updates.

The SUSE Manager 4 and SUSE Manager for Retail 4 platforms are designed to help enterprise DevOps and IT operations teams reduce complexity, optimize operations and regain control of IT assets both on premises and remotely, while also increasing efficiency and meeting security policies.  The latest versions get several new features, including …