SUSE

A Conversation with Kernel Developers from Intel, Red Hat and SUSE

Bryan Lunduke — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 11:30:00 +0000

Three kernel developers describe what it's really like to work on the kernel, how they interact with developers from other companies, some pet peeves and how to get started.

Like most Linux users, I rarely touch the actual code for the Linux kernel. Sure, I've looked at it. I've even compiled the kernel myself on a handful of occasions—sometimes to try out something new or simply to say I could do it ("Linux From Scratch" is a bit of a right of passage).

But, unless you're one of the Linux kernel developers, odds are you just don't get many opportunities to truly look "under the hood".

Likewise, I think for many Linux users (even the pro users, sysadmins and developers), the wild world of kernel development is a bit of a mystery. Sure, we have the publicly available Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML.org) that anyone is free to peruse for the latest features, discussions and (sometimes) shenanigans, but that gives only a glimpse at one aspect of being a kernel developer.

And, let's be honest, most of us simply don't have time to sift through the countless pull requests (and resulting discussions of said pull requests) that flood the LKML on a daily basis.

With that in mind, I reached out to three kernel developers—each working at some of the most prominent Linux contributing companies today—to ask them some basic questions that might provide a better idea of what being a Linux kernel developer is truly like: what their days look like and how they work with kernel developers at other companies.

Those three developers (in no particular order):

Dave Hansen, Principal Engineer, System Software Products at Intel.
Josh Poimboeuf, Principal Software Engineer on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Jeff Mahoney, Team Lead of Kernel Engineering at SUSE Labs.

Intel, Red Hat and SUSE—three of the top contributors of code to the Linux kernel. If anyone knows what it's like being a kernel developer, it's them.

I asked all three the exact same questions. Their answers are here, completely unmodified.

Bryan Lunduke: How long have you been working with the Linux kernel? What got you into it?

Dave Hansen (Intel): My first experience for the Linux kernel was a tiny little device driver to drive the eight-character display on an IBM PS/2, probably around 20 years ago. I mentioned the project on my college resume, which eventually led to a job with IBM's Linux Technology Center in 2001. IBM is where I started doing the Linux kernel professionally.

Go to Full Article

The Ceph Foundation and Building a Community: an Interview with SUSE

Petros Koutoupis — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 13:00:00 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

On November 12 at the OpenStack Summit in Berlin, Germany, the Linux foundation formally announced the Ceph Foundation. Present at this same summit were key individuals from SUSE and the SUSE Enterprise Storage team. For those less familiar with the SUSE Enterprise Storage product line, it is entirely powered by Ceph technology.

With Ceph, data is treated and stored like objects. This is unlike traditional (and legacy) data storage solutions, where data is written to and read from the storage volumes via sectors and at sector offsets (often referred to as blocks). When dealing with large amounts of large data, treating them as objects is the way to do it. It's also much easier to manage. In fact, this is how the cloud functions—with objects. This object-drive model enables Ceph for simplified scalability to meet consumer demand easily. These objects are replicated across an entire cluster of nodes, giving Ceph its fault-tolerance and further reducing single points of failure. The parent company of the project and its technology was acquired by Red Hat, Inc., in April 2014.

I was fortunate in that I was able to connect with a few key SUSE representatives for a quick Q & A, as it relates to this recent announcement. I spoke with Lars Marowsky-Brée, SUSE Distinguished Engineer and member of the governing board of the Ceph Foundation; Larry Morris, Senior Product Manager for SUSE Enterprise Storage; Sanjeet Singh, Solutions Owner for SUSE Enterprise Storage; and Michael Dilio, Product and Solutions Marketing Manager for SUSE Enterprise Storage.

Petros Koutoupis: How has IBM's recent Red Hat, Inc., acquisition announcement affected the Ceph project, and do you believe this is what led to the creation of the Ceph Foundation?

SUSE: With Ceph being an Open Source community project, there is no anticipated effect on the Ceph project as a result of the pending IBM acquisition of Red Hat. Discussions and planning of the Ceph foundation have been going on for some time and were not a result of the acquisition announcement.

PK: For some time, SUSE has been fully committed to the Ceph project and has even leveraged the same technology in its SUSE Enterprise Storage offering. Will these recent announcements impact both the offering and the customers using it?

SUSE: The Ceph Foundation news is a validation of the vibrancy of the Ceph community. There are 13 premier members, with SUSE being a founding and premier member.

Go to Full Article

Best Linux Marketing Campaigns

Bryan Lunduke — Wed, 05 Dec 2018 13:00:00 +0000

by Bryan Lunduke

I have long held the opinion that one of the biggest problems holding back Linux-based systems from dominating (market-share-wise) in the desktop computing space...is marketing. Our lack of attention-grabbing, hearts-and-minds-winning marketing is, in my oh-so-humble opinion, one of the most glaring weaknesses of the Free and Open Source Software world.

But, in a way, me saying that really isn't fair.

The reality is that we have had some truly fantastic marketing campaigns through the years. A few even managed to break outside our own Linux-loving community. Let's take a stroll through a few of my favorites.

From my vantage point, the best marketing has come from two places: IBM (which is purchasing Red Hat) and SUSE. Let's do this chronologically.

IBM's "Peace. Love. Linux."

Back in 2001, IBM made a major investment in Linux. To promote that investment, obviously, an ad campaign must be launched! Something iconic! Something catchy! Something...potentially illegal!

Boy, did they nail it.

"Peace. Love. Linux." Represented by simple symbols: a peace sign, a heart and a penguin, all in little circles next to each other. It was visually pleasing, and it promoted happiness (or, at least, peace and love). Brilliant!

IBM then paid to have more than 300 of these images spray-painted across sidewalks all over San Francisco. The paint was supposed to be biodegradable and wash away quickly. Unfortunately, that didn't happen—many of the stencils still were there months later.

And, according to the mayor, "Some were etched into the concrete, so, in those cases, they will never be removed."

The response from the city was...just as you'd expect.

After months of discussion, the City of San Francisco fined Big Blue $100,000, plus any additional cleanup costs, plus legal fees.

On the flip-side, the stories around it made for a heck of a lot of advertising!

IBM's "The Kid"

Remember the Linux Super Bowl ad from IBM? The one with the little boy sitting in a room of pure white light?

"He's learning. Absorbing. Getting smarter every day."

When that hit in 2004, it was like, whoa. Linux has made it. IBM made a Super Bowl ad about it!

"Does he have a name? His name...is Linux."

Go to Full Article

SUSE Software-Defined Storage Leverages Open Source to Break Proprietary Lock-in and Reduce Cost

John Grogan — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 11:57:20 +0000

by John Grogan

Gartner analysts noted in a recent Cool Vendor report:

It has become painfully evident that storage capacity demands, and expectations for far more rapid provisioning of that storage, have far outpaced the ability of [infrastructure and operations] teams' capabilities. Far-more-automated systems are required to restore a sense of balance, that is, storage solutions that offer much greater scale, but also much more automation.

The power of storage solutions has always resided in the software. SUSE software-defined storage gives one more flexibility and choice than traditional storage appliances provide. It allows users to meet constantly, even exponentially growing storage needs more securely and cost effectively using industry-standard hardware and open-source-based software-defined storage solutions. Accordingly, SUSE has introduced SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 with enhanced ease of management, improved performance and expanded features, including new disk-to-disk backup capabilities for enterprise customers, fulfilling the need for "much greater scale, but also much more automation" as cited by Gartner.

"Every generation of enterprise infrastructure innovation is now being built on open source", said Gerald Pfeifer, Vice President of Products and Technology Programs at SUSE. He continued:

SUSE is expert at both contributing to and using upstream innovation to create enterprise-grade, secure solutions that can be combined with other technologies to best address customer needs. This approach applied to software-defined storage delivers highly scalable solutions that radically reduce storage costs in terms of both capital and operations expense.

SUSE Enterprise Storage 5

The latest release of SUSE's intelligent software-defined storage management solution, SUSE Enterprise Storage 5, will enable IT organizations to accelerate innovation and reduce costs by efficiently transforming their enterprise storage infrastructures. It is based on the Luminous release of the Ceph open-source project, and it is ideally suited for compliance, archive, backup and large data storage. Large data applications include video surveillance, CCTV, online presence and training, streaming media, X-rays, seismic processing, genomic mapping and computer-assisted design. Backup and archive applications include Veritas NetBackup, Commvault and Micro Focus Data Protector, along with compliance solutions such as iTernity.

SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 is the first commercial offering to support the new BlueStore back end within Ceph. This follows SUSE's first-to-market support for iSCSI and CephFS in previous versions of SUSE Enterprise Storage. Notable benefits of this release include:

Go to Full Article

SUSE Unveils Near-Zero Downtime for SAP Apps

John Grogan — Wed, 11 Oct 2017 15:54:19 +0000

by John Grogan

Zero downtime is, of course, a mythical holy grail. According to IDC senior market analyst Prabhitha Sheethal Dcruz:

Zero downtime frequently translates to 99.999% uptime, which equates to 5.26 minutes of downtime per year. While short outages may be acceptable for non-critical workloads, the same is not true for business-critical and mission-critical workloads where the downtime stakes can be very high—consider a stock exchange where a single lost transaction may incur a significant financial cost or a medical system downtime that can cost lives.

So zero downtime is a lofty but difficult to achieve goal. SUSE recently announced a certified near-zero-downtime technology for workloads running in SAP software. According to Naji Almahmoud, SUSE vice president of Global Alliances:

SUSE is an expert at bringing together emerging, fast-paced open-source innovation and turning it into reliable enterprise-grade solutions. Customers running mission-critical workloads can now have more confidence as SUSE works closely with SAP to help ensure near-zero-downtime capabilities for its users.

SUSE, as you already likely know, is an open-source operating system and infrastructure provider for workloads running in SAP software. SUSE has further strengthened its offerings for users of SAP software with new support for high-availability and disaster-recovery solutions, such as:

SUSE support for takeover automation for scale-out clusters in SAP HANA: SUSE now provides automated takeover for users and applications, complementing the SAP HANA platform and data replication between SAP HANA nodes (scale-up) and clusters (scale-out). The SUSE offering is part of a leading platform for SAP solutions, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.
Certification for high-availability clusters and improved maintenance for SAP NetWeaver 7.40: SAP has certified SUSE technology to manage high-availability clusters running on the SAP NetWeaver technology platform. The certification, NW-HA-CLU 7.40, is available for x86-64 now, with support for Power (both Big Endian and Little Endian) coming in the next quarter. This makes possible transparent rolling updates of the SAP NetWeaver kernel. While support for SAP NetWeaver high availability has been available previously, SUSE now also supports SAP NetWeaver 7.40 and above, included in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.

For more information about SUSE support for SAP solutions and customer workloads, visit https://www.suse.com/products/sles-for-sap and https://www.suse.com/partners/alliance/sap.

Go to Full Article

SUSE and SAP: Shared Roots Produce Fruit

John Grogan — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 15:15:43 +0000

by John Grogan

SUSE and SAP have been collaborating for 18 years now. SAP is ubiquitous in the enterprise environment, and SUSE is now powering its robust SAP Cloud Platform.

Last year's SUSECon was all about the enterprise. This year's SUSECon doubled down on last year's commitment to becoming a leading enterprise service provider by announcing, among other things, this latest SUSE/SAP collaboration that has SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Enterprise Storage as key elements of the SAP Cloud Platform. The fruit of this collaboration will provide robust, enterprise-grade infrastructure services for running applications that allow businesses to collect, manage, analyze and leverage information of all types to extend and connect to business systems.

SAP Cloud Platform is SAP's agile Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for digital transformation, with comprehensive application development services and capabilities that allow businesses to innovate new edge scenarios, ultimately helping them to adapt and advance continuously. It enables customers to achieve business agility, create a truly integrated and optimized enterprise, and accelerate digital transformation across the business without the requirement of maintaining or investing in on-premises infrastructure.

SUSE OpenStack Cloud is an automated cloud computing platform that helps enable organizations to deploy rapidly and manage easily highly available, mixed-hypervisor private clouds. The latest version is based on the OpenStack Newton release. SUSE Enterprise Storage is an intelligent software-defined storage management solution, powered by Ceph technology. It enables IT to transform enterprise storage infrastructure to adapt to changing business and data demands seamlessly by delivering cost-efficient, highly scalable and resilient storage using commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives.

"Customers expect extremely high levels of reliability, scalability and performance, and SUSE has worked closely with SAP to help ensure that SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Enterprise Storage with SAP Cloud Platform deliver exactly that", said Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE chief technology officer. He continued:

Our shared roots run deep, as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications has long been a leading platform for SAP solutions on Linux. Today, SUSE also collaborates with SAP within the Cloud Foundry Foundation and shares a vision for the convergence of Kubernetes, containers and Cloud Foundry technologies. Through it all, SUSE's mission is to continue to be the best platform and open-source technology provider for running SAP applications, services and workloads.

Björn Goerke, chief technology officer and president, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP SE, commented:

Go to Full Article

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications

James Gray — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 14:46:16 +0000

by James Gray

Saving customers time, effort and budget as they implement SAP landscapes, including on-premises and now on-demand, are the core selling points for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.

The latest release of the SAP-focused SUSE Linux server is also now available as the operating system for SAP solutions on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The first supported Linux for SAP HANA on GCP, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications bolsters enterprise agility and reduces operating costs as customers pay only for what they use. With the addition of Google Cloud Platform, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications now is available on three major public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Go to Full Article

SUSE CaaS Platform

James Gray — Mon, 26 Jun 2017 11:33:34 +0000

by James Gray

There are a lot of decisions to be made before enterprises are ready for production and deployment of container apps, asserts SUSE. To help enterprises derive full value from containerized apps and not "re-create the wheel", the SUSE engineering team is busy creating the next-generation application development and hosting platform for container applications and services.

The novel SUSE Container as a Service (CaaS) Platform is an application development and hosting platform for container applications and services that lets users provision, manage and scale container-based applications and services, letting them focus on development of container applications to meet business goals faster while reducing costs in developing and maintaining container infrastructure. SUSE CaaS Platform comes with the following ingredients: a tasty new flavor of SUSE Linux Enterprise—container host OS called SLE MicroOS, a good dose of Kubernetes, a pinch of Salt and more special ingredients.

Go to Full Article

SUSE: A look inside the new SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 2

John Grogan — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 20:35:30 +0000

by John Grogan

A report from SUSECon:

While out in the streets of DC there was alternately depression and elation, gnashing of teeth and celebration, at SUSECon yesterday, SUSE announced SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack 2 designed to power physical, virtual and cloud-based mission-critical environments. The goal with this release is to help SLE users accelerate innovation, improve system reliability, meet ever more challenging security requirements and adapt to the accelerating pace of new technologies. SUSE expressed great pride in the fact that 2/3 of the Fortune Global 100 are currently using SLE.

“SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP2 has already earned rave reviews from partners and beta testers worldwide,” said SUSE VP of SLE Engineering, Olaf Kirch. “SUSE is committed to enabling customers to bring their state-of-the-art solutions to market faster by leveraging the latest technologies. They also need to run mission-critical workloads with maximum uptime and proven security. This latest version of SLE helps them do both using all the advantages of open source software.”

Enhancements in SLE 12 Service Pack 2 include: · A 10x increase in packet processing via software-defined networking which combines Open vSwitch with the Data Plane Development Kit. Added to SLE’s broad hypervisor support, the integration of DPDK gives users a complete virtualization solution for cloud and on-premise deployment.

· Even more agile support for SAP applications to ease migration to S/4HANA, accelerate deployment of SAP apps, tune SAP HANA for performance and create a more resilient & secure SAP environment with enhanced support for SAP HANA clusters even on geo levels.

· Further reduced downtime and improved I/O performance through persistent system memory applications using integrated NVDIMMs that save data in seconds and make it immediately available upon reboot.

· Increased ability to implement cost-effective, high performance data analytics on IBM Power Systems LC and OpenPower servers, including bare metal support.

· Time & resource saving “skip service packs” functionality allowing users to skip upgrades of prior service packs and jump straight to SP2.

· Ongoing FIPS 140-2 certification to meet the strict security requirements of federal government, FISMA and the financial industry.

· Reduced downtime for large-memory IBM Power-based systems via minimized memory initialization times for server restarts, along with high availability and geo clustering support for IBM Power.

· Support for ARMv8-A, including enablement for Raspberry Pi3, making SLE12 SP2 one of the first commercially available enterprise Linux platforms for this architecture.

· Support for Intel’s scalable Omni-Path Architecture to deploy HPC workloads.

Go to Full Article

The NEW SUSE Catalog is in!

John Grogan — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 19:28:15 +0000

by John Grogan

Ahhh…’tis the start of the holiday season! Time for turkey, good cheer, frantic shopping…and the SUSE Partner Catalog? Well, for all of you SUSE aficionados/users out there, this is a big deal. This online, searchable catalog is the most comprehensive listing of certified and supported software products in the enterprise Linux space. Our “category search” for Quality Monitoring & Lifecycle Tools yielded 30 vendor results…lots of options.

The new catalog includes high-level information on 11,400 independent software vendor offerings along with specific version-level details that help you determine the exact solutions you need for your operational environments. That’s a LOT of browsing so put on your comfy slippers, warm up some cocoa and take a seat by the crackling fire with your tablet, go to suse.com/susePSC/home and start building your wish list.

Go to Full Article