SUSE Boosts Business-Critical Computing to Help Customers Deliver Nonstop IT

As organizations face increasing pressure to become more agile and economically efficient by leveraging digital assets and information, the business success of many depends on high availability and responsiveness of their enterprise IT systems. To help ensure their success, SUSE® is expanding its portfolio of business-critical computing infrastructure solutions that provide nonstop IT and workload predictability for those customers. SUSE today unveiled SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching for IBM Power Systems and SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 12 Service Pack 3 to maximize the availability and responsiveness of business-critical IT systems. Building on the success of Live Patching for the x86 platform, SUSE is the first to provide Live Patching for IBM POWER.

Live Patching for IBM Power Systems lets customers apply Linux kernel fixes on the fly without interrupting service in IBM POWER environments. Live Patching keeps business-critical applications like in-memory database using SAP HANA running in the event of critical kernel security updates. SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 12 SP3 is a complete real time operating system that provides precision timing for critical application workloads. Service Pack 3 introduces the ability to mix real time and non-real time workloads on a single virtual machine so managing real time environments is easier and more efficient. These offerings are part of SUSE’s software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions that, along with SUSE’s flexible business practices and support for freedom of choice and best of breed, are more critical to IT organizations than ever before.

“Customers’ business success often relies on nonstop IT,” said Gerald Pfeifer, Vice President of Products and Technology Programs at SUSE. “Live Patching for IBM Power Systems and the latest Real Time update provide more uptime and predictability in the enterprise data center, which are essential to customers’ ability to satisfy the demands of business-critical workloads. In turn, they are able to meet the demands of their own customers more effectively, quickly adapting to changing market conditions and maximizing economic efficiency.”

Stefanie Chiras, Vice President, IBM Systems Group, said, “As a cognitive solutions and cloud platform company, IBM is changing industries around the world. A key part of this transformation is modernizing underlying infrastructure so it is highly reliable, high performing, secure and agile and it can fully leverage the data and investments in our customers’ enterprises. We’ve always worked hand in hand with partners like SUSE to deliver these capabilities. Live patching for the IBM Power Systems portfolio is another important step in this transformation and will help accelerate outcomes for thousands of clients worldwide.”

SUSE and IBM have collaborated on the world’s most mission-critical systems for more than two decades. IBM originally worked with SUSE to bring Linux to IBM’s largest systems, and today the companies continue to work together on new solutions that maximize performance, availability and customer choice.

Customers are demanding Live Patching as it helps them improve business continuity and lower costs by reducing downtime, increasing service availability and enhancing security and compliance. Downtime is not an option for a host of business-critical applications ranging from artificial intelligence apps, big data analytics and databases such as Oracle and SQL to performance-demanding in-memory database applications such as SAP HANA.

“The live patching function on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is al­most invisible: it just runs and there are no reboots,” said Hans Lenting, IT Architect for SVHW, a government service organization in the Netherlands that runs a large number of interconnected applications to support important municipal services. “It enables us to apply major maintenance and security patches with no downtime. Live patching is a huge benefit for the hypervisor layer, which we need to keep ‘in the air’ for as long as we can. Without this, we would be faced with bringing down all 40+ virtual machines each time we needed to apply critical patches – at least once a month.”

SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 12 SP3 is an open source real time operating system designed to reduce latency and increase the predictability and reliability of time-sensitive, business-critical applications with process and task prioritization and scheduling. This new release provides an updated real time kernel for advanced application workloads that require precise timing and synchronization.