OpenStack is at the center of most IT organizations’ cloud strategies, today.  Businesses and governments have started implementing these strategies. As they begin this process and come to rely on their clouds ensuring not only the rapid deployment and easy management of OpenStack, but also the availability, security, and compliance of the cloud and the workloads running in the cloud will become paramount.  For those tasked with building and administering these enterprise-class cloud environments this may require a boost to their existing strong technical skill sets.  And that means training.

Intel and SUSE, two of the leading OpenStack contributors, will be conducting three hands-on training workshops in late November and early December.  These all-day workshops will ramp-up your cloud skills and teach you the tips and tricks to get your OpenStack cloud enterprise-ready with enhanced security and availability.  Among other topics, those in attendance will learn how to:

• Automatically deploy highly available OpenStack cloud services
• Manage a multi-hypervisor cloud infrastructure
• Verify launch time components through trusted compute pools
• Automatically launch and assign workloads to compute nodes based on requirements
• Tag workloads to verify their location and that of its associated data
• Avoid compromising security in the cloud
• Enhance IT compliance

Give yourself the early Christmas present of OpenStack knowledge by registering now.

Wednesday, November 26^th – Amsterdam

Thursday, December 4^th – San Francisco

Wednesday, December 10^th – New York

Every year you get lots of invites to attend annual conferences.  Deciding which ones to attend can be a minefield so here are some simple ways to make sure you get the most out of them.

1. Get an education

Particularly in IT, no matter how experienced you are, keeping up with the market trends, latest products or solutions can be an ongoing learning process. Conferences give you a not only a great opportunity to learn from experienced people but also to expose yourselves to new ideas and trends that can impact future projects and results.  Not only can you hear and learn new things, you should also have the opportunity  to see live demonstrations and talk to experts about solutions and options for your business.

2. Network with peers

Its not just about sitting in a room with a bunch of strangers and not talking all week. The downtimes in a conference are about taking the opportunity to network with your peers. Talking with your competitors or non­competitive colleagues is an opportunity to find out about best practices, special projects or troubleshooting.  Discussing projects with your peers can also spark new ideas and spark inspiration.

3. Encounter new vendors and suppliers

Sometimes people view the trade show at the conference as nothing but an inconvenience. They fear that  it is just a sales pitch that is waiting for them. Actually, this is a good time to get to know what various vendors offer versus your existing suppliers.  Discovering innovative products and services for your business is necessary to stay competitive in today’s fast-­paced world. So these interactions can also add value to your business.

4. Position yourself as an expert

When you are active in a specialty within IT, you soon become the expert not only in your company but also for peers in other  industries.  When you engage openly and share your knowledge, you’ll soon discover the benefits this brings at work as well externally to your company.

We are planning for SUSECon on these ideas. It’s important to us that the event isn’t just a holiday,  but that we add real value for our attendees. To see for yourself the reasons why you should be there, November 17 – 21, visit our website.

Working with OEMs and IHV partners, I get a lot of opportunities to share our unique story.  One of the most exciting parts of our story is around what we do to enable rapid development and deployment of partner solutions.  As we all know, time to market is a key factor in the successful launch of a new product or solution initiative, but it is often the greatest challenge.  Other challenges include satisfying security and compliance requirements and maintaining an installed customer base.  Let me share a little how partnering with SUSE can help you solve these issues with ease.

SUSE Studio & Kiwi

One of SUSE’s most important tools for our partners is SUSE Studio.  No matter whether you are using the online version (susestudio.com) along with a half million other folks or the onsite version, this tool provides a mechanism to rapidly (as in 10 minutes for a basic image) develop a deployable image.  The magic doesn’t stop there.  Studio also provides a test-drive mode that launches your image inside a kvm virtual machine and tracks changes.  This allows you to boot, test, reconfigure and save the changes all without having to relaunch hundreds of times to be sure it’s right.

One of the biggest benefits of SUSE Studio is the multitude of image types that can be deployed.  Raw disk image, vmdk, ovf, pre-install iso, ami, etc.  The options seem nearly endless when you consider that these represent almost every one of the used image types used by cloud, enterprise or desktop virtualization environments.  With some of the types available, you can launch directly into Amazon, Azure or Google Cloud, making the environment even more useful.

But wait, there’s more.  Not only does SUSE Studio provide all of these benefits, but there is also the Gallery.  For SUSEStudio.com, this allows you, the software author/appliance designer/etc to share your masterpiece with the world.  The gallery is a browseable and searchable listing of many thousands of appliances.  If you’re using Studio Onsite, you can build gold images that can be used for factory installations, gold masters or starting points for other appliances.

So, I hope by now that you’ve already gone to susestudio.com to see for yourself what the excitement is all about, if not, go there now. 🙂  When you’re done looking around, you may say, “Yeah, but I need a more complex drive layout”, or “I need to do something special during the boot process to interact with my hardware.”  If this is the case, you can export your appliance’s kiwi image definition file.  This file allows you to customize your image even further and then build it with the open source kiwi image building tool.

SUSE Lifecycle Management Server

For a startup business, designing, building and deploying an entitlement and update infrastructure can be daunting.  Instead of fretting about it, partner with SUSE and use SUSE Lifecycle Management Server.  This tool integrates with SUSE Studio/kiwi and allows you to entitle customers to receive updates and manage the update QA process.  This time saving tool makes it very easy to bring products to market and still ensure you are able to provide updates.

Security Certifications

Another challenge experienced when introducing a new product to the market is how to ensure that the end user feels comfortable with the security of your solution.  This is much easier when you base your device on an OS that can demonstrate that it has achieved certifications like common criteria (EAL-4+), FIPS, etc.  While these may not all “trickle down” to your solution, it provide a solid starting point to pursue those certifications that may be required by your customer base.  For more information on our security certifications, click here.

Partner Support

OK, great! You’ve been able to build your image, take it to market and create entitlements for the hundreds or thousands of orders you are receiving.  What do you do when something goes wrong?  While we try to ensure that SUSE Linux is the most solid Linux available, it is inevitable that some piece of hardware will act funny or an edge case appears around your particular usage pattern.  In these cases, SUSE is able to provide our partners with industry leading L3 support.

Our L3 support acts as your back-line after you triage the issue and determine it is something at the OS layer of the stack.  These L3 engineers aren’t just anybody.  These are the folks that support the OS that drives mission critical devices like CT Scans, enterprise disk arrays, Air Traffic Control systems, etc.  They know what it means to identify an issue and ensure the fix is right.  This is why SUSE has the #1 rated support for Linux in the industry.

WOW!

Awesome you say?  But wait, there’s still more!  SUSE offers many other tools, some through the community like the Open Build Service, others through our partnering options, and yet others through our services group (need a “Help Me” project?)

Any way you look at it, SUSE provides our partners with the most tools and support and is committed to their success.  If you’d like to know even more, get in touch with us through our partner programs found here!

SAP customers invest in SAP HANA” is the conclusion reached by a recent market study carried out by Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC). In Germany alone, half of companies expect SAP HANA to become the dominant database platform in the SAP environment. In many cases, the “SAP Business Suite® powered by SAP HANA” scenario is already being discussed in concrete terms.

Naturally, SUSE is also accommodating this development by providing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications – the recommended and supported operating system for SAP HANA. In close collaboration with SAP and hardware partners, therefore, SUSE will provide two resource agents for customers to ensure the high availability of SAP HANA system replications.

SAP HANA SR and SUSE Cluster

Two Replication Scenarios

The current initial phase of the project includes the architecture and development of scale-up scenarios, which will be tested together with SAP in the coming weeks. System replication will help to replicate the database data from one computer to another computer in order to compensate for database failures (single-box replication). This is to be followed by a second project phase involving an extension for scale-out scenarios (multibox replication). With this mode of operation, internal SAP HANA high-availability (HA) mechanisms and the resource agent must work together or be coordinated with each other.

SUSE implements these scenarios with the SAPHana resource agent (RA), which performs the actual check of the SAP HANA database instances and is configured as a master/slave resource. In a scale-up scenario, the master assumes responsibility for the SAP HANA databases running in primary mode, and the slave is responsible for instances that are operated in synchronous (secondary) status.

To make configuring the cluster as simple as possible, SUSE also developed its SAPHanaTopology resource agent. This runs on all nodes of an SLE 11 HAE cluster and gathers information about the statuses and configurations of SAP HANA system replications. It was designed as a normal (stateless) clone.

Customers Receive Complete Package

With both the SAPHana and SAPHanaTopology resource agents, customers will therefore be able to integrate SAP HANA system replications in their cluster. This has the advantage of enabling companies to use not only their business-critical SAP systems but also their SAP HANA databases without interruption while noticeably reducing their budgets. SUSE provides the extended solution together with best practices documentation.

SAP and hardware partners who do not have their own SAP HANA high-availability solution will also benefit from this new SUSE Linux development.

The OpenStack Grizzly Summit in 2012 drew 1,200 attendees most of them developers or people checking out what OpenStack and cloud were all about. Keynotes and booth conversations were focused on technology, building the developer community and code base, or what people might try and do with OpenStack one day.

Fast forward to this week and that day has come. The theme of this week has been the enterprise user, what more they need from OpenStack development and the applications and use cases they are delivering today in OpenStack clouds. Booth conversations are more focused on the value that various OpenStack offerings can deliver to enterprise IT and their end user customers. The OpenStack Foundation has even started a new Superuser publication because, as Mark Collier noted in his Day 2 Keynote, OpenStack is helping enterprises to increase their speed and build business agility (if not the food lines at the summit).

As the provider of the first enterprise OpenStack distribution, way back in August 2012, SUSE has always recognized the value that OpenStack can deliver to businesses. We have focused the development of SUSE Cloud on the needs of our customers. By making OpenStack easy to install, ensuring interoperability and support for mixed hypervisor environments and now delivering automated configuration and deployment of a highly available control plane, so the cloud is always up, SUSE delivers on the enterprise vision for OpenStack.

If you are at the summit swing by the SUSE booth to hear how we are executing that vision in the future. And make sure you join Cameron Seader in Room B101 at 11:00AM to hear how your organization can successfully deploy OpenStack in a multi-hypervisor environment.

Yes, we’re all talking about big data, but with the big numbers associated with that market it is really no surprise, is it? IDC is forecasting a 27 percent compound growth rate resulting in $32 billion spent on big data technology and services through 2017. When I think about a market of that size, I immediately think about partnership and collaboration.

Turning massive amounts of structured and unstructured data into useful business insight takes an optimized combination of computing power, managed storage and intelligent analytics. And making that combination into a real-world solution happens best through partnership, interoperability and collaboration.

Here are a few ways SUSE and our partners are collaborating to deliver real-world optimized solutions today.

SAP HANA

• SAP HANA is one of the gold standards for in-memory computing.
• Today’s HANA systems deliver that stability, flexibility and performance running on a highly optimized SUSE Linux Enterprise.
• A great real-world example is CIR food, which now generates business analysis reports with millions of data points on thousands of customers in seconds. With open source, it saved 70 percent in the process.

Hadoop Partners

• Hadoop is the most recognizable name in open source big data processing – and partners like Cloudera and Hortonworks are clear leaders.
• Working with SUSE allows these Hadoop distributions to provide optimized performance and enterprise-grade end-to-end support.
• For details about setting up, running and tuning Hadoop workloads, read this new whitepaper.

Teradata

• For more than a decade, Teradata has been a consistent leader in data analytics on a large scale.
• Teradata delivers its entire portfolio of solutions exclusively on SUSE Linux Enterprise. Learn more here.
• Data-intensive businesses around the world, like Netflix, depend on the Teradata/SUSE partnership for complex analysis of millions of customers around the globe.

Big data is about bringing agility and performance to bear on what would previously have been nearly incomprehensible amounts of data and information. Both agility and performance are hallmarks of enterprise Linux and open source technologies, which is why big data leaders are using open source technologies and partnering with open source companies like SUSE to generate the next generation of data management, processing and analytics.

We’re just scratching the surface of what will become possible in the near future, and we’re looking forward to collaborating with our open source communities and our partners to bring that future to our present.

Many organizations are taking advantage of OpenStack services to deliver IT resources faster to the line of business.

Whether speeding the development, testing and deployment of new applications or rapidly implementing an online marketing campaign, OpenStack clouds are significantly impacting business results.

If you are an operator or consumer of OpenStack services at one of these organizations the OpenStack Foundation would like to hear from you.

The foundation is conducting its bi-annual OpenStack user survey to understand your OpenStack implementation and your expectations for new and improved OpenStack services in future releases.

Interest and adoption of OpenStack continues to grow because of the importance its community of dynamic, innovative developers place on meeting the needs of the OpenStack user.  By taking 10 minutes of your time to fill out the survey, you can influence and provide direction to the community and help improve OpenStack.

ClamSAP – SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Integrates Virus Protection for SAP

Daily press reports show that increased networking and digitalization of the business world are subjecting companies’ IT systems to ever more serious security risks. Cybercrime study undertaken by PwC comes to the conclusion that the number of global security incidents has risen by 25% over the previous year.*

Most of the companies surveyed suspect that hackers are behind such incidents. This is followed by attacks carried out by direct competitors and members of organized crime outfits.
Security incidents are particularly serious if they affect highly sensitive and business-critical data relating to SAP applications. Malfunctions or failures of SAP processes can result in substantial sales losses and significant damage to a company’s image.

Virus Scan Interface from SAP

To counteract the threat from external files and active content, such as digital customer orders, application documents, and knowledge management documents, SAP has included a virus scan interface (VSI) in its SAP NetWeaver® application platform. SAP NW-VSI enables users to seamlessly integrate the antivirus and content security products of external vendors into their own SAP system environments. Documents and files imported into SAP applications get automatically scanned for viruses, worms, and Trojans.

Cross-platform protection

With its ClamSAP virus protection program, SUSE has merged two libraries into one solution package that combines the ClamAV open-source virus scanner with SAP NW-VSI 1.0. ClamAV checks e-mails on UNIX-based e-mail gateways for malware and has long since been a key component of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server  – more precisely, since Release 10. ClamSAP, on the other hand, is now available with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 11, and has been since Service Pack 2 (SP2).

ClamSAP offers SAP customers the following benefits:

• Protection against cross-platform threats
• Antivirus scans of incoming documents and files
• No additional license fees necessary
• Automatic updates through the freshclam program.

It can also be used by SAP Mobile Platform®, the central management and development platform for all mobile applications. This is especially useful since more and more employees are accessing their SAP systems from mobile devices such as tablets or smartphones. Effective virus protection is becoming increasingly important in this area in particular.

* PricewaterhouseCoopers: “Defending yesterday – Key findings from The Global State of Information Security® Survey 2014”, September 2013
http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/consulting-services/information-security-survey/assets/pwc-financal-services.pdf

Flexibility, accessibility and mobility. The “walled fortress” era of enterprise computing is fading fast and being superseded by a multitude of new and dynamic work-modes and devices. From GPS systems, home automation and even traditional enterprise IT services, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to contemplate products, services or even business processes in which the concepts of flexibility, accessibility and mobility are not part of the architecture.

And the backbone of these infrastructures will run predominately on Linux. So, what’s next for the major trends in enterprise Linux this year? We see converged IT, clouds (in many forms) and demand for big data to drive the omnipresence of Linux and open source.

Cloud

This will be the year of OpenStack deployment reality, and the project’s incredible momentum will drive real-world success. For many, the tire-kicking and proof-of-concept phase will be over. CIOs will initiate full-on implementation projects aimed at developing the next generation infrastructure and data management capability required to align IT agility with the dynamics of their fiercely competitive markets. Full production private clouds will be deployed complete with capabilities like orchestration for automated management and telemetry for measuring utilization. The OpenStack community and vendors will support this next phase with mature training, best practices and standards-based certification programs.

Big Data

Back in 2011, an IDC study found that the volume of digital data was growing 40-50 percent year over year. Extrapolating from that, the study predicted that the 40 trillion gigabyte digital universe of today will explode by a factor of 50 by 2020. This 50x growth also applies directly to the amount of information managed by enterprise data centers. Though still a broad term, “big data” is not just hype, and for many enterprise organizations it is fast becoming day-to-day reality. Like cloud, big data solutions in their many forms (Hadoop clusters, in-memory DBs, etc.) are building on Linux and harnessing the incredible power of the open source model across a whole range of open source projects to deliver innovation at an unprecedented pace and scale.

Converged IT

According to Gartner research in 2012, many enterprises began embracing new technologies focused on the convergence of social, mobile and cloud systems and infrastructure – including the massive amounts of related data. Now, two years later, that early adopter phase is over, and for many enterprises the reality of business simply requires a customer-centric approach built on this convergence. Linux and open source leads the way here as well, providing the rapid innovation and flexibility required to transform the hype of convergence into enterprise solutions built on open industry standards.

Conclusion

2014 is about breaking down traditional IT barriers and practices in order to drive real business growth and customer value with Linux and open source-powered innovations and technologies that have moved from hype to reality over the last year.