SUSE announced the general availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 3

SUSE today announced the general availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 3. This latest service pack brings additional industry-standard hardware support and open source features and enhancements to SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, the most interoperable platform for mission-critical computing - across physical, virtual and cloud environments. With Service Pack 3, customers can achieve better workload performance in a more scalable, secure and cost-effective manner.

"IT plays a critical role in our business strategy, and SUSE Linux Enterprise has been our platform of choice for running mission-critical workloads for many years," said Urs Frey from Informationstechnologie at Die Schweizerische Post. "The stability and usability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 3 is quite impressive, and we plan to deploy more workloads on it."

Service Pack 3 gives customers more scale-up and scale-out options to run their mission-critical workloads with support for new hardware, features and enhancements. Service Pack 3 also includes all of the patches and updates released since the introduction of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 in 2009. As a result, it is the most secure foundation available for migrating workloads from UNIX and other operating systems and running them reliably and cost effectively.

Service Pack 3 is the ideal scale-up choice to migrate resource-intensive workloads that run on RISC/UNIX systems. It exhibits excellent scaling behavior and virtualized workload support for the latest AMD Opteron 4000 and 6000 Series Platforms. Service Pack 3 adds support for the latest Intel processors (Intel Xeon processor E5 Family and the 4th generation Intel Core processor), and it has features specifically related to these processors for improvements in virtualization and power savings. These Intel processors have improved performance, reduced network I/O latency and increased energy efficiency compared to earlier generations.

Service Pack 3 can scale up to support even the largest systems. Service Pack 3 supports up to 4,096 logical CPUs and 16TiB of system memory. Support for IBM zEnterprise System zEC12 Flash Express hardware allows access to low latency, high throughput storage and a reduction in SAN traffic. The large vertical scalability of SUSE Linux Enterprise makes it an ideal virtualization host for consolidating server workloads to increase server utilization and datacenter efficiency. Service Pack 3 includes commercial support for the latest open source hypervisors, KVM 1.4 and XEN 4.2. At the same time, Service Pack 3 supports hardware features delivered by the latest processors, to improve the efficiency of virtualized workloads. With high-performance x86 hardware, Service Pack 3 can provide a highly virtualized environment to run mission-critical workloads securely and cost effectively.

Service Pack 3 also offers improved scale-out for workloads with shared storage, such as web servers and clustered file servers. It includes important driver updates, such as Open Fabric Enterprise Distribution (OFED), that give customers faster connection speeds, greater choice of standards and easier fabric management. It also introduces features like LVM thin-provisioning and new iSCSI Target (LIO) for better storage virtualization and management.

To address IT service availability challenges, SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 11 Service Pack 3 packages the latest and best open source clustering technologies available in the market today. Available on x86 (32 bit and 64 bit), Itanium, POWER and System z architectures, it delivers enhanced GUI usability and allows monitoring and managing services without installing software on the service side by using unique, new Blackbox monitoring. Furthermore, Geo Clustering for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, the only available geo-clustering solution provided by an enterprise Linux vendor, offers unlimited distance high availability clustering. Both of these products support physical, hybrid and virtual clustering, giving customers greater flexibility in deployment.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was recently awarded Common Criteria Certification EAL 4+. In addition, in April 2013, SUSE Linux Enterprise received U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 validation for its OpenSSL module. As a result, customers can rely on it for handling sensitive information and meeting defined standards. Service Pack 3 is the first enterprise Linux distribution to integrate the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) secure boot mechanism, significantly reducing the potential for malicious attacks during system start up.

"With the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 3, we are delivering scalability and security enhancements to our customers," said Michael Miller, Vice President of Alliances and Marketing, SUSE. "These enhancements will help them maximize resource utilization and improve business agility when they are facing economic and competitive pressures."

Partners support Service Pack 3

Dell

"We see strong demand from our customers for Dell and SUSE joint solutions, making it a growth business for us," said Sally Stevens, vice president of PowerEdge marketing, Dell. "We are pleased by the new technologies available in SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 3 that help customers optimize their datacenter using Dell PowerEdge Servers and other Dell enterprise solutions. It's the innovation and the solid engineering that make our Dell and SUSE solutions valued by our customers and that help Dell to deliver on our promise of industry-leading solutions to data center and IT needs."

HP

"Achieving greater efficiency through workload consolidation and increasing server utilization is a constant concern for our customers," said Scott Shaffer, Director of Linux Server Engineering, HP. "With the latest improvements in CPU, memory, I/O and KVM performance made to SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 3, HP ProLiant Gen8 servers are able to address these concerns, maximizing IT efficiency with fewer servers than ever before."

IBM

"IBM and SUSE have been testing a variety of the new features on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server," said Jean Staten Healy, Director of Linux and Open Virtualization, IBM. "SUSE's upstream community contributions to KVM and Linux, combined with optimizations for IBM systems, can help meet the evolving needs of our clients."

Intel

"For 20 years, Intel and SUSE have collaborated to help deliver open standards-based solutions offering performance, reliability, efficiency and security for mission-critical applications powered by Intel Xeon Processors," said Diane Wortsmann, Intel, Datacenter Software Planning Manager. "Intel's latest products continue to enhance the performance, scalability and efficiency of Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 3 takes advantage of those advancements."

Designed to address customer needs for scalable, secure and mission-critical computing across the enterprise, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 3 contains major upgrades to the following products:

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z
SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension
GEO Clustering for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware
SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack