SUSE Manager and Point of Service: A Dream Team

Blue sky with no clouds over Nuremberg today. So let’s go with a “brick-and-mortar” topic for a change. I’ll get back to the Cloud soon:

Some of you may know that my former role at SUSE was to take care of the Retail and Point of Service business. As the only Linux vendor in the market we have a product that is tailored to the needs of retail infrastructures: SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service, or “SLEPOS”.

It’s a solution that allows you to highly automate rolling out and updating tens of thousands of cash registers or other Point of Service devices like kiosk systems from a central administration server using an infrastructure of branch servers.

SLEPOS uses operating system images that are built using a tool called “Image Creator” that comes with the administration server or with SUSE Studio. As you can create “delta images” that only contain the parts of the image that have changed, efficiently updating machines to a new version of the image is no big deal.

But sometimes using images isn’t the best option. Or not the only option you want to have. That’s where RPM software packages come into play — and with them SUSE Manager with its comprehensive patch management functionality. With the combination of SLEPOS and SUSE Manager you can use images to initially deploy new Point of Service hardware or roll out major revisions of the software and then use RPM packages to distribute minor updates, security patches or bug fixes.

SUSE Manager also adds strong configuration management and monitoring functionality to your Point of Service solution that SLEPOS on its own can not provide. That’s why I think SLEPOS and SUSE Manager are a dream team.

But enough said: A video can say more than a thousand words. 😉

And if you want to know more, check out these presentation slides!

This is Joachim Werner blogging live from SUSE in Nuremberg, where we are using the experience we have with managing large physical Linux infrastructures to build the Enterprise Cloud infrastructure of the future.