SUSE gets chipper for Intel, goes large for SAP on Azure
As one would naturally expect at an annual convention, SUSE saved up a few partner, product, platform type announcements to break at its SUSECON show this week.
Among the positive push proclamations made at SUSECON 19 was news of support for 2nd Generation Intel Xeon scalable processors, formerly code named ‘Cascade Lake’.
This news follows news detailing SUSE’s status as the first enterprise Linux optimised for Intel Optane DC persistent memory with SAP HANA workloads earlier this year.
SUSE president of engineering, product and innovation Thomas Di Giacomo has said that this connection will help organizations embrace hybrid and multi-cloud as well as on-premises environments.
Persistent memory
Intel says its persistent memory technology will spark new applications for data access and storage, with in-memory database solutions being just one application.
Persistent memory (also sometimes called PM, or PMEM… and sometimes known as storage class memory) is a solid-state high-performance byte-addressable memory device that resides on a memory bus so that it can enjoy the ‘luxury’ of DRAM-like access to data.
The byte-addressable element means that programs can access their data structures ‘in place’ i.e. at the location that they exist. What really makes persistent memory stand out is that it’s fast enough to access directly from the processor without having to stop to perform the block Input/Output (I/O) for traditional storage.
Intel’s Andy Rudoff describes persistent memory here and delves into why there’s so much activity around it in the industry lately.
Alper Ilkbahar, vice president and general manager of datacenter memory and storage solutions at Intel has said that his firm is focused on data-centric transformation by ‘disrupting the memory and storage hierarchy’, no less.
Going large (instances) on SAP HANA
Also in major partner news, SUSE has noted the availability of the first enterprise Linux image for SAP HANA ‘Large Instances’ on Microsoft Azure. We are told that the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications image on Azure provides consistent build and management capabilities on Azure.
SUSE is working with Microsoft and the community to deliver enterprise-grade Linux and other solutions that enable customers to create, deploy and manage workloads anywhere with exceptional service, value and flexibility.
“This is a customer-driven solution jointly developed with Microsoft to provide the advanced high availability and storage security for SAP HANA Large Instances that customers need,” said Daniel Nelson, vice president of Products and Solutions for SUSE.
Nelson says that SUSE is delivering an SAP-certified platform for Azure that is pre-configured and able to make customers productive faster.
How big is a large instance?
SAP HANA Large Instances on Azure are purpose-built hardware configurations for SAP HANA workloads that require memory sizes larger than 0.5 TB.
SUSE is collaborating with Microsoft to support mission-critical workloads for SAP HANA environments up to 60TB in size with the stability and reliability of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.
KY Srinivasan, general manager, OSS at Microsoft Corp., said, “Our joint customers are using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications as the underlying operating system to ensure a reliable platform that is validated on Azure Large Instances. It represents the innovation that marks our long relationship as we continue to work together to provide solutions that meet demanding enterprise customer requirements.”
As noted here, despite SUSE’s open openness, SUSE spans other proprietary world and so SUSE Linux Enterprise is in fact the leading Linux platform for SAP HANA, SAP NetWeaver and SAP S/4HANA solutions – it aims to provide optimised performance and reduced downtime as well as faster SAP landscape deployments.