Search results: “business one”

We all see it whenever we look up into the sky: clouds are transient formations. Depending on the weather conditions, they can provide the backdrop to a pleasant evening or herald the onset of severe storms. Something true about these clouds, they constantly CHANGE! These clouds are very different from those that enable users to access essential ICT resources via a network: cloud computing stands for continuous reduction in costs and complexity. This means companies do not need to invest in their own IT infrastructure, but simply pay for services they actually use and benefit from the higher capacity utilization offered by cloud vendors.

The latest example is SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud®, which enables customers to leverage the benefits of SAP’s in-memory technology for real-time analyses in next to no time – with less risk and without the costs that would otherwise be incurred by on-premise implementation. With its HANA Cloud Platform, SAP offers numerous applications for all aspects of ERP, CRM, and NetWeaver Business Warehouse environments as “Managed Cloud Services” on a HANA basis.

Infrastructure with Amazon Web Services

Since 2009, SUSE has been working closely with SAP to support the use of SAP applications via Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is a leading provider of SAP products in the cloud and also maintains a direct partnership with SUSE to offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Amazon EC2 Web services. SAP HANA has been available in the AWS cloud since early 2012; a combination of the fastest in-memory platform and the public cloud, SAP HANA One, since October 2012. Both are based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, the operating system that is recommended and supported by SAP for use with HANA.

New Library from the Cloud

SAP also relies on the AWS platform and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for its new SAP Cloud Appliance Library®.  This on-demand offering is free of charge and was developed to provide customers with preconfigured software solutions for testing, evaluation, and training purposes within just a few hours and for a limited time period. Instead of spending their time setting up systems, companies can concentrate fully on putting the new functions to the test for their on-premise applications.

Enabling Change

Real clouds constantly change whilst cloud computing enable change through agility, flexibility, and focus on strategic business goals.

SUSE recently attended the Storage Virtualisation Cloud (SVC) Awards at the Jumeirah Carlton Tower in London’s Knightsbridge and I’m pleased to say we walked away with the award for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Solution of the Year for SUSE Cloud 2.0.

The IaaS category was hotly contested, as it was open to any solution that “delivers or contributes to effective Infrastructure-as-a-Service implementations for users of private and/or public cloud environments.” This win was particularly pleasing because once a shortlist has been created by the judges the awards are decided by a public vote, meaning that many of the votes would have come from happy customers and users.

SUSE Cloud 2.0 was judged on the basis of its key features, its impact on the market and benefits for SUSE customers, plus its USPs and major differentiators from other products on the market. The product is designed to deliver enhanced capabilities for OpenStack-based private clouds and is the most enterprise-ready private cloud platform based on OpenStack. It offers an integrated installation and administration framework that leads to greater scale and ease of operation as well as faster return on investment.  SUSE Cloud is also the only enterprise OpenStack distribution to easily manage mixed hypervisor cloud environments.  All of these key attributes were no doubt taken into account by the judges when making their decision to put SUSE on the shortlist for the public vote.

The SVC Awards reward the products, projects, services, companies and teams operating in the cloud, virtualisation and storage sectors. The awards seek to recognise the achievements of end-users, channel partners and vendors alike.

Franziska Priebe, marketing manager of award organisers Angel Business Communications, comments: “This year we have had not only a significant increase in the overall number of nominations but also in the total votes received. The SVC  Awards recognise the users, manufacturers and suppliers operating in the cloud, virtualization and storage sectors and are voted for by the readers of our wide range of print and online publications. All finalists did well in making the shortlist but SUSE was the clear winner in its category, IaaS Solution of the Year.”

As you can see from the photo, we were delighted to win this award in recognition of the strength of SUSE Cloud 2.0. I would like to take this opportunity to personally thank all of our customers who took the time to vote for SUSE.

The ‘What’s Next for IT?’ video debate series is a “forum where expert IT influencers discuss cloud, data and security trends and technologies that are top of mind for business and tech clients.” So says the web landing page for the next session of IBM’s Smarter Computing Debate Series. 

On Tuesday, October 29, IBM will be hosting a debate on Open Computing. Below is a short abstract for the session.

Some experts say that open computing gives you the speed, integration and choice that proprietary systems can’t offer. But of course, there are other experts who disagree. Join us for the latest in our “What’s Next for IT” Debate Series and watch as three experts have a spirited back-and-forth conversation on the pros and cons of open computing.

I mention this series for many reasons. For one, IBM is one of our hardware alliance partners, has a strong commitment to Linux and open source computing, and I love getting to work with the great people there. I also bring it up today because one of the panelists in the next session is one of those great people I get to work with, Adam Jollans, the program director for Cross-IBM Linux and Open Virtualization Strategy.

So check it out, I’d love to hear what you think of the session in the comments. And (shameless plug) come to SUSECon, where you might hear IBM talk a little more about Open Computing.

Attending a partner’s sales event is always a rewarding experience, even if it’s not always 100% positive.

Meeting with the sales teams of our partners is not always a love fest, after all, because the people in the field meeting their customers and selling our products alongside their own often meet with concerns that need to be addressed.

That’s a part of doing business in any sector: people have questions and concerns, and sometimes they are not delivered in the most constructive way.

After attending the SGI Sales Summit last week, though, I came away from the event feeling energized by all of the fantastic comments we received at the SUSE booth from the SGI sales and executive teams.

From the CEO to the CMO to the salespeople in the field, everyone had great things to say about SUSE, in terms of our product quality and how easy we were as a company to work with. Usually there’s always some negative concerns from customers, but in this case, there wasn’t any.

It tells me that we are doing our jobs right. Being a great Linux company is not just about making the best software (though we think we do), but also about listening to the customer’s needs and addressing what they want, not what we think they want.

We seem to have gotten that right this time.

We’ll always be ready and willing to listen to all of our partner and customers concerns, of course, but it’s always nice to have the affirmation that we are doing what we have set out to do.

The Cloud Expo in New York City on June 10-13 will be a great event to check out what’s new and innovative in cloud computing.

Our own Business Development Manager Frank Rego will be joining Chris Haddad, VP of Technical Evangelism at WSO2 for a talk on “Bridging IaaS and PaaS to Deliver the Service-Oriented Data Center.”

SUSE and WSO2 believe that private PaaS will leverage the automation and scalability of Private IaaS solutions, such as OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud, to deliver the secure, standardized development environments that will make migrating to an agile, service oriented delivery model possible. Come learn how the combination of IaaS and PaaS enables enterprises to more efficiently and flexibly tackle the challenges of the modern connected enterprise.

Attendees can also stop by and visit SUSE team members at Booth 331 during the show. We are going to be giving away a Callaway Razr X each day of the event at the booth. Particpants will play the Tiger Woods Wii golf game and whoever’s closest to the hole each day wins the driver.

SUSE is also happy to be a Bronze Sponsor at Cloud Expo and has a large supply of no cost attendee passes for customers, partners, and interested technologists. Please follow the steps below to obtain your no cost pass for the event.

Sponsor “VIP Gold Pass” Guest Registration Easy Steps

1. Go to our special registration page – https://www.blueskyz.com/v3/Login.aspx?ClientID=19&EventID=70
2. Fill out the Attendee Information form
3. Select the VIP Gold Pass Registration Option
4. Enter the Discount Code: SuseVIPgold
5. Abracadabra! The price will re-set from $2,000 to $0 – what’s not to like?

Though VIP Gold registration does not – understandably since it is free – include lunch, Cloud Computing Bootcamp, Cloud Essentials, or Collectible Conference Bag – it gives you Full Conference Access for all four days – June 10-13 – which means you can choose from our 150+ breakout sessions, general sessions, industry keynotes, and “Power Panels” and of course attend the Expo Floor.

The New York event now includes Big Data Expo and SDN Expo, too. In short, a VIP Gold guest will be able to enjoy Four Busy Days, Three Crucial Themes, at One Convenient Location.

Today is the last day of exhibition at Supercomputing Conference 2012. And the Salt Lake Tribune really hits the mark with its recent article about Supercomputing being now part of everyday life.

In a sense, everyone has baby supercomputers these days, whether or not they are used for technical workloads.

An important category within threshold applications is “ultra-scale business computing”, means applications that are not traditional HPC workloads, but which require supercomputing levels of scale, thus resulting in using HPC-specific solutions or technologies. Take new and “hype” companies like eBay, Google, or Amazon, as an example: even if the web-based transactions or searches are not traditional HPC applications or workloads as such, these companies use HPC or supercomputing technologies to deal with all the data processings and run them at extreme scale.

And have you ever wondered how big and how mission critical SUSE Linux Enterprise can get? SUSE’s partner Teradata is a Global Leader in Enterprise Data Warehousing, and the companies customers have many of the industry’s biggest enterprise data warehouse systems—each with up to hundreds of processors and terabytes of data. Teradata’s parallel database systems and many of its software products run on SUSE Linux Enterprise. Among Teradata customers are most of the Top 10 Telco companies, many of the top 10 airlines, more than half of the top 10 transportation logistics (Mail, Package, Freight) firms, many leading banks, and companies such as Coca-Cola or eBay. Why did Teradata choose SUSE Linux Enterprise? Check it out yourself and watch the Teradata success video.

Linux is the undisputed operating system of choice for traditional HPC workloads or “number crunching”. This is again proven by the most current list of the top500 supercomputers, which has just been published yesterday during the Supercomputing Conference 2012 in Salt Lake City. An impressive 93,8% of all supercomputers listed here is running Linux.

But with regards to “High Productivity Computing”, there are still some challenges to solve:

• Enterprises are adopting Linux for all kinds of workloads in their data centers. But many organizations and companies do still trust in “unpaid” and unmaintained Linux versions for their HPC computing. However, HPC is an integral component of today’s enterprise computing infrastructure. Therefore, standard IT policies should be implemented, means that customers should deploy maintained Linux systems – such as SUSE Linux Enterprise – in order to get the system updated automatically and have access to 7 x 24 support. One of the biggest values of a maintained Linux operating system to the end user is the quality of the operating system and the support customers can get from the company producing it. An IT organization that is operating a Linux platform without a support and maintenance ecosystem behind is entirely dependent on the good will of the development community in case of technical difficulties. This situation harbors an incalculable risk. If critical questions are not answered quickly or correctly, this can cause system failures and data loss. SUSE has been working closely with leading hardware and software vendors for years now, and is strengthening its partnerships to provide even better value for its customers and provides broad support services from all relevant vendors.
• Enterprises that are long-time UNIX users for their HPC business workloads need to understand that they fully can rely on Linux, that Linux did reach UNIX parity and in many segments even surpassed UNIX with regard to availability, scalability and performance.
• Businesses that are used to use Windows need to “have the heart” to check out alternatives – and dual-boot HPC systems might be a first step. As Linux and Windows seem to become the two dominant platforms of the future in the enterprise, there will be an increasing need for these operating systems and the tools that manage them to work well together. Systems that lack well-developed interoperability capabilities can cause inefficiencies throughout the enterprise. For example, limited interoperability between Linux and Windows environments, in both physical and virtual instances, can lead to server sprawl. It can also lead to redundant management tools and inefficient use of IT staff. This translates as well for HPC; it seems to be logical that the two major platforms used in the HPC market will be Linux (primarily) and Windows – and they need to interoperate well in this area also.

Thanks to its speedy adoption of technical innovations and improvements – or even better, as Linux very often is “spearheading” technical innovations, Linux will further play a significant role in the new HPC market dynamics, where HPC turns more and more into “High Productivity Computing”.

Coming next:

Part V – How HPC innovation is spilling over to mainstream IT

During the past days, I’ve been attending the International Supercomputing Conference 2012 in Hamburg. This is one of two events (the other one is Supercomputing in the US) where the newest list of the top 500 supercomputers of the world is released – Amie just published a nice blog about SuperMUC, the fastest supercomputer in Europe, that runs SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2.

At the show, I have got so many good questions about SUSE’s “role” in HPC, and there wasn’t even enough time to go in detail for all of them. Thus I decided to make up for it with a short series of blogs.

The first question I’d like to address is “What is your perspective on how Supercomputing, High Performance Computing and Linux have evolved over the past decades?”

The past few years have seen significant changes in the High Performance Computing landscape – recently often referred to as High Productivity Computing. This happened at least in part due to the emergence of open source and new clustering technologies.

A few years back, UNIX variants such as AIX, HP-UX, Tru64 UNIX, Solaris, etc., ruled. Clustering independent, commodity-class machines-and building supercomputers out of them was a controversial idea as recent as 15 years ago. For the last 20 years, HPC technologies have been mainly (and still are) used in areas such as academic research, fluid dynamics, oil and gas exploration, computer aided design and testing, and pharmaceutical and military research. The historic cost of HPC or “supercomputers” had limited their use to market segments that could afford these systems.

But the evolution of both lower cost hardware and Linux has dramatically
reduced the cost of these systems. Compute power has increased on a scale of one thousand times in just a few years, allowing many companies to use the power of supercomputers in the form of an HPC Linux cluster on commodity hardware.

Relatively suddenly (and by market standards), Intel and AMD replaced RISC processors, and thanks to its maturation and low costs Linux unseated UNIX as the dominant operating system. Today, in HPC environments Linux is a given, and has displaced the majority of the UNIX systems. While the low price was a key argument for Linux in the past, today customers buy Linux-based systems for the excellent performance, reliability, scalability, and security. Because it is open source, naturally the TCO of Linux infrastructures is still unbeaten.

Linux had steadily incorporated HPC features over the years and has become the primary OS for clustering and HPC deployments. Excellent operating system performance is required to achieve best possible performance and scalability of the HPC system. In order to gain performance, HPC systems running on Linux have also been spearheading the industry with regards to the deployment of latest architectures, such as e.g. new chips like the 64bit processors (Intel Itanium2 or AMD Opteron), or technologies like Infiniband.

Virtually every industry is adopting Linux clusters to attain the performance improvements needed to deliver on organizational goals. Seismic analysis for oil exploration; aerodynamic simulation for motor and aircraft design; molecular modeling for biomedical research; and data mining and financial modeling for business analysis all leverage HPC. Organizations are also adopting clusters based on Linux to ensure constant uptime, while still leveraging the flexibility, reliability and low cost of open source.

Linux clusters have also become easy to set up and simple to manage. More importantly, there are a lot of resources available for HPC on Linux – many of them free. Today, even the large business and research agencies are using Linux for their HPC requirements because Linux on a cluster of x86 servers is more economical.

COMING SOON – Part II: SUSE’s evolution and position

The first thing that could happen attending a GSE event is that you are the one to ensure that all the other attendees will have a lot of fun – if they “treat” you as they did with us:

Marcus Kraft, the Product Manager for SLES for System z, and myself, have been “arrested” during the medieval knight’s banquet in the old rock vault beneath the city of Nuremberg.

After we finally were “rescued”, we were trying to find out why the heck they picked us. Meanwhile I am convinced it was because the organizers took to heart our logo tag line: “We Adapt. You succeed.” They knew we would be as flexible as our operating system, to make sure the social evening event will be a success. But serious – we had a lot of fun, too!

The second thing that normally happens if you are exhibiting at GSE is that your give-aways are gone after the second day (… lucky you are if the event takes place in your headquarters hometown!). Seems everyone loves our green Chameleon named Geeko!

Geeko drove a lot of traffic to our booth, and we had really good conversations. For me, the most important reason to attend events is to have a direct dialog with our customers and partners, to understand how our mainframe customers are using our products and solutions, and what we can do
to improve and make sure they really get what they need to be successful with their businesses. There is no better opportunity than actively
participating in events like GSE.

And the third thing that hopefully happens is that you learn a lot yourself, by attending the sessions. The mixture of technical topics and customer experiences was really perfect during the Spring conference. From Sven Schuetz (IBM Boeblingen Lab) we learned about PAV, HyperPAV and Large Volume Support for Linux, thanks to Rob van der Heji (Velocity Software), I am now a real expert in Linux on z/VM performance and in understanding disk I/O, and Dr. Holger Smolinski (also IBM Boeblingen Lab) told us about new functionality and capabilities of z/VM and Linux for System z.

My personal highlights however were the talks that included customer scenarios:

• Claudia Prawirakusumah (IBM Boeblingen Lab) shared her experience with customers that implemented the Solution Edition for Cloud Computing for Linux on System z , and she explained the different levels of adoption – from private to public cloud.
• Ralph Heimburger (Dataport – SLES for System z customer) did detail why his organization chose Linux on System z as their strategic platform, and he let us know about the current status of their project.
• And my favorite: Randolf Sigmund (BG-Phoenics – SLES for System z customer ) took us along his emotional “journey” he went through during the implementation of their hybrid IBM zEnterprise System. The take-away from his enthralling, enthusiast and entertaining talk in a nutshell: Implementing the zEnterprise System is still a revolutionary approach, as it involves different departments that formerly had no or just very few contacts. Thus, to make your project successful, you need to be sensitive, and you need to convince the people behind the project – in all different departments – that it is a change for the better for the entire company.

These are only three things that can happen when you attend a GSE event. I am sure you will find more – just try it out yourself next time. The GSE
Autumn conference takes place Oct 22-24, 2012 in Mainz/Germany.