SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 3 released

SUSE has 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 behaviour and virtualised 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 virtualisation 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 datacentre 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 virtualised 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 virtualisation 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 maximise resource utilisation and improve business agility when they are facing economic and competitive pressures."