SUSE Accelerates Transformation in the Cloud with Solutions for Microsoft Azure

According to a new global study commissioned by SUSE and conducted by Insight Avenue, IT leaders are under pressure to deliver tangible outcomes in the next two years through technology investments, and with the current global pandemic, that pressure will only increase. Eighty percent of those IT decision makers believe optimizing the data center is critical to their innovation efforts. Public cloud providers, including Microsoft Azure, are helping companies make this happen.

SUSE is broadening its solutions for Azure, designed with our mutual customers in mind. We understand from our work with organizations the imperative to transform and grow, both securely and efficiently, in today’s environment. To meet these growing customer needs, SUSE continues to expand its collaboration with Microsoft with the following announcements:

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE CaaS Platform supported by Microsoft Azure Arc for servers, simplifies an enterprise’s journey to a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Azure Arc extends Azure management to servers and Kubernetes clusters, and it enables the deployment of Azure data services anywhere, from on premises to multi-cloud. Azure Arc for servers gives customers a central management control plane with security and governance capabilities for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server systems hosted outside of the Azure cloud, such as edge deployments. In concert with Azure Arc, SUSE Manager orchestrates the deployment and lifecycle of the systems, while Azure Arc manages policy compliance. Azure Arc is currently available in public preview and is available to all Azure customers. In addition, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on SQL Server 2019 is fully supported for production use for users who choose to modernize their on-premises data estate, or run SQL Server in Azure virtual machines.

• SUSE Cloud Application Platform is now available on Microsoft Azure via the Azure Marketplace as a bring-your-own-subscription (BYOS) offering. Now, developers can be more productive, more quickly, as this release simplifies deployment of SUSE Cloud Application Platform into Azure Kubernetes Service. With new Terraform scripts, SUSE’s offering lets customers set up Kubernetes clusters quickly, correctly and repeatably. Deploying SUSE Cloud Application Platform on top of a full-featured Kubernetes distribution such as Azure Kubernetes Service eliminates scaling issues and mixed environment concerns. Through an Open Service Broker API, customers can take advantage of the entire Azure ecosystem to maximize their infrastructure investment.

• SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing is now available on Microsoft Azure via the Azure Marketplace as both pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and BYOS SUSE Linux Enterprise HPC uniquely contains an Azure-tuned kernel specifically designed for faster throughput and reduced latency, resulting in greater solution capabilities. Customers building ever-growing, data-hungry applications can now accelerate both delivery and scalability, either natively or through cloud bursting, of solutions previously confined to expensive, fixed-scale on-premises infrastructure. This offering is an open source solution featuring integrated support from SUSE and Microsoft.

“Microsoft and SUSE are working together to deliver the capabilities and cost savings that our customers need,” said Arpan Shah, general manager, Azure. “From support of hybrid deployments through Azure Arc with SLES VMs and SQL Server on SLES, to faster time to implementation with mission-critical SAP workloads running SLES for SAP on Azure, to 231 SUSE-certified high-performance computing ISV apps running data-intensive tasks seamlessly in our cloud, Microsoft Azure and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server are helping organizations to be more productive.”

See More at SUSECON Digital

You can see SUSE and Azure solutions in action during our upcoming SUSECON Digital keynotes and technology demos which will be available beginning May 20 at 2 p.m. BST. The expansion of SUSE offerings on Microsoft Azure gives our customers more options as they transform their organizations using the technology and timing that makes sense for them.