SUSE Rolls Up Cloud, Storage, And HANA for Startups
Enterprise Linux vendor SUSE announced a batch of initiatives this week at a company event, including a "bring your own subscription" option and a preview of new storage offering. SUSE also said it will back an initiative to help big data startups develop new applications based on the SAP HANA platform.
The portable subscription option allows customers to transfer existing SUSE subscriptions to a public cloud provider certified by the software vendor. That would allow customers to deploy new workloads or migrate existing ones from datacenters to the public cloud.
SUSE touts its cloud platform based on its Linux Enterprise Server and employing OpenStack as allowing fast deployment of workloads whether they are running in a datacenter or in the cloud. The company said subscribers could transfer workloads to the cloud at no additional cost.
The company also said during its SUSECon event this week in Orlando, Florida it has begun beta testing of a software-based storage option. Described as "self-healing and self-managing," the new storage option is based on the Firefly version of the Ceph open source project.
Features to be wrung out during beta testing include cache tiering, thin provisioning, remote replication, copy-on write cloning and erasure coding, SUSE said. The new storage approach also uses commodity disk arrays, which the company said would help meet growing demand for object, archival and bulk storage.
The new SUSE storage option is scheduled to be released during the first half of 2015, the company said.
Meanwhile, SUSE said it would begin offering big data and other tech startups a developer version of SAP HANA on its Linux Enterprise Server as a single virtual machine. The download would be free for six months. Making SAP HANA available as a single virtual machine is seen as a way for startups to leverage the in-memory database management system as they develop prototype applications.
The free VM running SAP HANA on the SUSE Enterprise Linux Server can be downloaded here.
The partners claim more than 1,500 startups are participating in the technology incubator program.
Also this week, SUSE announced a "live patching" option that would allow SLES customers to perform system patches without rebooting. The live patching feature is part of the kGraft project, which delivers a stream of packages used to update a running kernel without interruption.
The offering updates "critical kernel patches without rebooting, reducing the need for planned downtime by patching frequently," the company said in a statement. The live patching option is intended for mission-critical systems like in-memory databases, simulations and "quick fixes" in datacenters.
The live patching option is available via subscription for X86_64 servers, and is delivered on top of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, which was just released last month.
