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SUSE® Expert Days

SUSE Expert Days

3 Welcome

4 Who Are We?

5 SUSE Expert Days

5 The Software-defined Data Center

6 SUSE Products and Solutions

Uptime and Efficiency Improvements in the Data Center

OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure

Software-defined Scalable Storage

Lightweight Virtualization with Docker Containers

Learn the Technology. Certify Your Learning.

22 Customer Case Studies

Altran

Apollo-Optik

Datalounges

Epitech

Hostnordic

Thank you for joining us at our SUSE Expert Days Tour. This roadshow continues growing year over year. This year we are going global with more than 70 stops in countries in the

EMEA, North America and Asia Pacific regions.

This brochure gives you a comprehensive overview of our company, our vision of the software-defined data center (SDDC) and the products and solutions we offer. We want to provide you with the tools you need to succeed.

We have selected a number of new customer stories that illustrate—in addition to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Manager—that there is a growing interest and adoption of SUSE OpenStack Cloud. Our customers talk about the advantages these SUSE solutions provide for them and share their experience with you.

Enjoy reading, learning and being part of our growing ecosystem.

Hope to see you back next year at one of our stops!

Ronald de JongPresident of SalesSUSE

Welcome

4 5I SUSE EXPERT DAYS

Who Are We?

SUSE®, a pioneer in open source software, provides reliable, interoperable Linux, cloud infrastructure and storage solutions that give enterprises greater control and flexibility. More than 20 years of engineering excellence, exceptional service and an unrivaled partner ecosystem power the products and support that help our customers manage complexity, reduce cost and confidently deliver mission-critical services. The lasting relationships we build allow us to adapt and deliver the smarter innovation they need to succeed—today and tomorrow.

SUSE Expert Days

The Software-defined Data Center

A SUSE Expert Day is a one-day event full of technical conversations and demos, providing IT professionals with the tools and information they need to keep pace with the evolving needs of the data center.

SUSE Expert Days started a couple of years ago in the U.S., and soon became a big success in Europe, the Middle East,

Africa and Russia. This year we will have more than 70 stops in which we tell the SUSE story. “We” means our SUSE experts including product managers, architects, consultants, key partners and IT professionals working together to facilitate discussions of new key topics that are relevant to today’s IT professionals.

Market forces like globalization, technology, big data and cloud are driving the evolution of the data center. As IT professionals, you are faced with the challenge of meeting business requirements for rapid delivery of new services in the face of increasing complexity and inflexible infrastructures. What you need is a shared, on-demand IT environment that enables you to quickly deliver new services while ensuring that critical applications have the highest levels of availability and performance. A SDDC helps you maintain control with automation that frees your IT staff from routine deployment and management tasks, so that they can focus on strategic initiatives.

A SDDC or Virtual Data Center (VDC) is a vision for IT infrastructure that extends virtualization concepts such as abstraction, pooling and automation to all of the data center’s resources and services to achieve IT as a service (ITaaS). It holds the promise of hybrid cloud environment in which compute, network and storage capabilities are decoupled from hardware dependencies, completely flexible and scalable to meet the needs of business and controlled by internal IT teams. When this happens, the data center will truly be the great strategic asset and source of competitive advantage that every organization wants. Long deployment times and the rigidity and inefficiencies of hardware-defined infrastructure will be relics of the past.

Because SDDC is a vision with many possible implementation scenarios, it will constantly evolve and improve. It’s pragmatic at its core—giving you the flexibility to choose the innovative technologies that meet your requirements for increasing efficiency and managing costs, without vendor lock-in.

Open source plays a very important role. It offers solutions for software-defined computing, storage and networking technologies that are the building blocks of SDDCs. The SDDC is a journey that you can begin NOW to address new challenges, leveraging your existing infrastructure investment.

SUSE is a major player in this market. SUSE has a forward-looking vision for enabling the rapid delivery and management of business solutions where workload infrastructure is determined by each application’s requirements for performance, reliability and scalability. SUSE provides a pragmatic approach to the evolution of data center operations, giving you the flexibility to choose the innovative technologies that meet your requirements for increasing efficiency and managing costs, without vendor lock-in.

Read about how SUSE can help you start your journey toward the SDDC with innovative open source technologies like OpenStack, Docker, Linux containers and Ceph, hardened for enterprise operations and backed by outstanding support. We will show you how our products and solutions, centered round the main themes that pave the way to a SDDC, can help you achieve your business goals.


Improved Operational Efficiency • Docker is an open source technology that automates the

deployment of applications inside software containers. It provides an additional layer of abstraction and automation of OS-level virtualization on Linux. Docker and Linux containers are great ways to build, deploy and manage applications. You can also improve your operational efficiency with full Docker support on three hardware architectures including IBM z Systems.

• Portus is an easy-to-use tool for faster and more secure delivery of business applications with the Docker private registry.

• The subscription management tool (SMT) is our proxy solution to help large organizations centrally receive patches and updates for their SUSE Linux Enterprise software. It provides our customers a way to easily migrate and gain much simpler and faster access to updates and patches. SMT is also the prescribed way for large organizations to gain the benefits of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Modules. Systems management functionality beyond a pure proxy is provided by SUSE Manager.

• Just Enough Operating System (JeOS) is a minimized form factor of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, introduced for creating customized cloud application configurations that are easy to deploy and maintain, consume fewer resources and improve security. Beyond OpenStack-based private cloud environments, JeOS is also available as a guest for KVM, Xen and VMware hypervisors. JeOS is delivered as minimized, ready-to-run virtual images to make the virtualization deployment more efficient. It is also delivered as a KIWI template for customers and partners to use to start golden images.

Accelerated Innovation• Full support. SUSE provides accelerated Innovation

through support for all recent hardware from IBM and Intel, including Intel Xeon and IBM z13. SUSE is the only distribution to currently offer full support for IBM z13.

• Modules. Modern innovation can outpace the traditional enterprise software delivery model. The modules available in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 meet this need by providing faster integration with upstream updates. This design approach lets you balance the flexibility of the modules and stability of the infrastructure. SP1 provides new modules to apply updates for Linux container features or security requirements without having to update and recertify the base operating system. SUSE also provides a Package Hub, enabling the latest technologies developed by the open source community to be compiled by SUSE for use with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

• Shibboleth is a single sign-on (log-in) system for computer networks and, specifically, the web infrastructure. It allows people to sign in using just one identity to various systems across different domains. Shibboleth software is now included in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP1.

• Security standards compliance. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 is in evaluation for a Common Criteria Certification, and multiple security modules are in process for a FIPS 140-2 validation with the NIST. Among those modules, OpenSSL has already been certified (Cert#2435); the certification of other modules, such as Open SHH client and server, Strongswan (IPSec-based VPNs) and the Kernel Crypto API, is still in progress. See the NIST list of modules in review.

SUSE Products and Solutions

SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP1

SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP1 is the advanced foundation for SDDCs. It offers increased data center uptime, greater operational efficiency and accelerated innovation, so that you can be more responsive to business needs and support revenue growth. It delivers enterprise-quality resiliency, security and manageability, in physical, virtual and cloud environments and reduces your risk of vendor lock-in and technology obsolescence.

Product Overview SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 is a highly reliable, scalable and secure server operating system for efficiently deploying highly available enterprise-class IT services in physical, virtual or cloud environments. Designed for mixed IT environments, it offers best-of-breed performance with reduced risk of technological obsolescence or vendor lock-in.

The only enterprise Linux recommended by Microsoft, SAP and VMware, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 is optimized to deliver high-performance, mission-critical services and cloud and virtual hosting, as well as infrastructure workloads and services.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 is a modular, general-purpose operating system and runs on three processor architectures. It also is optimized to run on leading hypervisors and supports an unlimited number of virtual machine guests per physical system with a single subscription, making it the perfect guest for virtual and cloud computing.

SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP1 has been released and features new hardware and Docker support. It gives customers new capabilities for maintaining application uptime, improving the efficiency of data center development and operations and bringing innovative solutions to market faster. In addition, SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 12 and Geo Clustering for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 12 have been updated to simplify management of backup and disaster recovery systems. With SUSE Linux Enterprise, SUSE takes advantage of the latest Linux kernel, developing and contributing back to the community innovative features such as live patching, system rollback and a graphical user interface for high availability configurations, all of which reduce the need for planned downtime and the impact of unplanned downtime.

What’s New in SP1? Key benefits and features include: Increased Uptime

• HAWK is the updated SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension user interface, allowing you to monitor and administer your Linux cluster.

• Network Teaming is a technology that applies to various methods of combining multiple network connections in parallel. Similar to Network Bonding, which is already supported in SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, the Network Teaming feature increases throughput beyond what a single connection could sustain and provides redundancy to increase network uptime.

• Rollback on service pack upgrade allows you to do a full system rollback easily while minimizing risk.

• Interactive and unattended upgrades feature allows system administrators ton quickly and easily upgrade their SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems, reducing downtime, lowering administrative costs and improving quality. In fact, SUSE Linux Enterprise has been supporting (manual) major version upgrades for ten years. With YaST, you can interactively prepare a suitable profile and then use AutoYaST to automatically upgrade groups of servers.


SUSE Manager

With SUSE Manager, you get improved usability, provisioning, power management and new IT compliance and security features. SUSE Manager simplifies installations, especially for smaller setups, and focuses on further reducing operational costs. SUSE Manager helps you monitor, control and manage your SDDC. And it delivers complete lifecycle management and monitoring for Linux servers.

Manage SUSE Linux Enterprise the Linux WayAutomate your Linux server management to increase

productivity. Automated Linux server management with SUSE Manager reduces administrator effort, increases productivity and produces fewer outages. It is the fastest way to multiply your Linux ROI.

Reduce the complexity of Linux systems management. SUSE Manager is the best solution for managing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server across major hardware architectures, virtual platforms and cloud environments.

Secure your workloads and ensure compliance. Need help meeting compliance and security challenges? SUSE Manager allows you to automate operating system tracking and auditing processes to ensure compliance with internal policies and external regulations.

Move from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to SUSE Linux Enterprise. SUSE Manager makes it easy to transition from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to SUSE Linux Enterprise by managing both distributions. You can replace Red Hat Network Satellite with SUSE Manager easily while retaining data and configuration, and re-using customized scripts, templates and processes.

Core FunctionalityAsset Management. Get a complete hardware and software

inventory of your systems. Use unattended bare-metal system provisioning to add unprovisioned (“bare-metal”) systems that are capable of PXE (Preboot Execution Environment) booting to an organization.

Provisioning. Automate the provisioning of operating system instances on bare metal hardware using AutoYaST, Kickstart and PXE boot. Provision virtual guests as easily as physical instances. Provision new servers with the identical characteristics of a server that is already running or with a predefined configuration. Track server changes and return to a previous version or configuration if required. Support first-time installation with rapid setup of network installation environments.

Software Package Management. Collect and distribute custom software packages into manageable groups. Centrally push software by grouping servers, thereby easing the burden of manually managing each server individually. Create customized repositories for the delivery of operating system packages or RPM Packet Manager-based (RPM-based) applications and content.

Use the SUSE Manager user interface to migrate SUSE Linux Enterprise to new SUSE Service Packs. Leverage the SUSE Manager application programming interface (API) to create custom scripts that allow you to easily automate many of the tasks you perform every day. In addition, the SUSE Manager API enables integration with third-party applications or systems management tools.

Search operating system instances by packages, patches or system specifications to reduce administrative overhead. Remove unnecessary system packages and freeze the current configuration to avoid package installations by mistake.

Patch Management. Use the Zypper update stack (on SUSE Linux Enterprise) to rapidly and consistently deploy patches and updates. Receive notifications when the latest software updates are available for Linux servers. Connect to SUSE Customer Center to easily access updates, security patches and service packs.

Plan maintenance windows ahead of time by scheduling updates at the maintenance time you are choosing. Apply role-based controls to ensure administrators have the appropriate level of authority to manage each system.

Configuration Management. Centralize configuration file management for server groups and use these files in combination with AutoYaST or Kickstart for complete provisioning. Develop and maintain standardized configuration profiles for servers or groups of servers to simplify initial server provisioning. Easily migrate custom scripts for Red Hat Network Satellite, create new AutoYaST and Kickstart scripts or use SUSE Manager to develop new scripts based on existing installations.

Ready to Go, Prepared to Grow

SUSE Expert Matthias Eckermann We are happy to announce SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 JeOS — Just enough Operating System.

In private clouds and virtualized data centers today, fast deployment is critical to achieve operational efficiency. How can you quickly fire up an image in your virtual data center or private cloud without worrying about application certifications? Facing hundreds of virtual machine images, how do you make sure they are standardized in configuration so as to be efficient?

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 JeOS – pronounced “juice” – is a slimmed down form factor of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server that is ready to run in virtualization environments and private cloud. With SUSE Linux Enterprise Server JeOS, you can get the most out of your SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription to fit your needs.

Ready to GoJeOS trims components down to keep the size small. It is designed specifically for virtualization environments such as Xen and KVM, as well as VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V. It is ready-to-run in your hypervisors to save you time in deployment and configuration.

If your applications are certified on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server today, you do not need to re-certify for JeOS. JeOS is based on the same code base as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. JeOS is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. For no extra effort, you get the same enterprise-grade, mission-critical performance, stability and services.

Prepared to GrowIncluded in your SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 subscription, KIWI simplifies the process of producing golden images. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server JeOS is also delivered as a KIWI template that makes large-scale configuration management easy. The KIWI template may serve as a silver image to your golden images for deployment.

We were tempted to call the product “KIWI Juice” based on this relationship, and how sweet, green and healthy JeOS is for (y)our environment. Yet, the naming committee advised us to avoid any relationship between a serious enterprise operating system and a fruit juice. Well.

Back to SeriousBecause SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 JeOS is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, you can employ it in all use cases where you can employ SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. And you can customize it, like you can customize a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server system. Just register your JeOS. This gives you access to all packages available for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, to updates and security fixes, and it is a prerequisite to be eligible for support. Register the image by either using your existing SUSE entitlement or getting an evaluation key.


Redeployment. Redeploy on the same hardware if required. Your physical interaction is not needed.

Monitoring, Compliance and SecurityHealth Monitoring. Monitor server health from the SUSE

Manager console and easily extract valuable information about the systems managed by SUSE Manager. Prevent issues before they occur. Monitor memory space, disk usage, CPU utilization, and network services. Receive warning notifications when servers are exceeding usage thresholds, so you can quickly respond to issues. Create custom probes or use the built-in operating system probes and third-party application probes to monitor the health of servers, virtual guests and applications. Monitor group probes for faster deployment and improved consistency. Get all information about updates on a single page and develop graphical reports of your server performance.

Compliance. Gain a secure log of all activities for auditing. Follow standards to maintain the security of your Linux enterprise systems, such as verifying patches, checking security and configuration setting. In addition, examine your Linux systems for signs of compromise. Use OpenSCAP to maintain enterprise systems’ security by automatically verifying the presence of patches, checking system-security configuration settings and examining systems for signs of compromise.

Security. Leverage the easy-to-use interface to CVE (Common Vulnerability and Exposures) vulnerability data. Easily search for publicly known information about security vulnerabilities and exposures.

Three Reasons Why You Should Be Eagerly Awaiting SUSE Manager 3

SUSE Expert Meike Chabowski According to a Forrester study, IT spends 70 percent of its budget on just maintaining its existing environment.

Many customers tell us this percentage is even higher in their organizations. The reason is that data centers have become increasingly complex. But a market-proven systems management solution, such as SUSE Manager, can make our customers lives much easier. SUSE Manager includes everything a good system management solution should combine: asset management, provisioning, package and patch management, configuration management, redeployment options and bare metal provisioning. One of the biggest advantages of SUSE Manager is the ability to quickly, securely and efficiently manage and administer various Linux distributions with the same tool. And you can manage more than just Linux systems: SUSE Manager also integrates with Microsoft System Center.

Many customers also tell us SUSE Manager is a great solution that significantly reduces their IT costs, gives them more time for other projects and provides greater security and stability in their Linux infrastructure. But we would not be SUSE if we did not strive to make something that is really good even better. We are heading now towards the SUSE Manager 3 release. With SUSE Manager 3, we are pushing three major themes, exciting technologies that will further enhance this unique Linux systems management solution:

1. Redesign of the Subscription Management component.SUSE Manager 3 will give you very detailed insights into your usage of SUSE Linux Enterprise. You can optimize your usage of SUSE subscriptions and make it really easy to create reports for physical servers AND virtual machines and Linux instances running in the cloud.

2. Integration of the new Icinga monitoring stack.Icinga is a modern monitoring server that is compatible with Nagios. This will be a very lightweight and loosely coupled integration that will take into account that some of our customer often have their own existing Nagios or proprietary monitoring solution that they want to use instead. With Icinga, you get an easy-to-use monitoring solution, but at the same time you have the flexibility to use what you already might have in-house. It is all about flexibility and choice.

3. And most important: a completely new configuration management approach with Salt from SaltStack.As of today SUSE supports both the Puppet and CFEngine configuration management tools on SUSE Linux Enterprise 12. Now we add the increasingly popular remote execution, orchestration and configuration management framework Salt. Salt comes with many advantages: It gives you a very scalable, fast and secure way of communicating with systems in real time. It allows you to collect system status about installed packages, configuration files, etc. in a very efficient way. It has a very easy to use and easy to extend system of so-called “state files” that allow you to hierarchically describe the configuration of your systems. And we can automate and orchestrate cloud deployments and Docker containers.

But the biggest advantage probably is that Salt allows you to move from scheduling jobs on systems to real-time configuration management and monitoring. This means that, while today it can still take some time until a SUSE Manager server has patched hundreds or even thousands of servers in huge customer environments, with Salt this will improve massively thanks to two special features:

Salt executes commands on many servers in parallel Salt can react by itself to events with its integrated

“Reactor” system

In the future, with Salt, scenarios such as orchestrating servers in an event-driven infrastructure (i.e., where a change on one server can trigger a configuration change on another server or even start new server instances) to real-time monitoring, security compliance and even “self-healing” IT landscapes will be possible.


Key FeaturesSUSE OpenStack Cloud supports all OpenStack Juno release components, ensuring enterprises have best-in-class capabilities to deploy an open source, private cloud.

Installation Framework. Integration with the Crowbar project speeds and simplifies the installation and ongoing administration of your physical cloud infrastructure.

Mixed Hypervisor Support. Enhanced virtualization management through support for multi-hypervisor environments that use KVM, Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, or VMware vSphere.

High Availability. Automated deployment and configuration of control plane clusters. Ensures continuous access to business services and delivery of enterprise-grade SLAs.

Ceph. Integration with SUSE Enterprise Storage™ provides a streamlined deployment of a single solution for distributed block, object and virtual machine image storage.

Scalability. Cloud control system designed to grow with your demands.

Open APIs. Using the standard APIs, customers can enhance and integrate OpenStack with third-party software.

Block Storage Plug-Ins. Solutions from leading storage vendors such as EMC, NetApp and others, providing users with broad choice.

Networking Plug-Ins. From Cisco, Midokura, Infoblox, Nuage Networks, PLUMgrid, Open vSwitch and VLAN bridging solutions, providing flexibility in networking cloud set-up.

Award-winning Support. SUSE OpenStack Cloud is backed by 24X7 worldwide technical support.

Full Integration into SUSE Update Processes. Easily maintain and patch cloud deployments.

OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure

Everything is moving fast these days, and your business simply has to keep up. The pace of change can be painful to manage, but it also creates new opportunities that you simply cannot ignore.

How can you cope with the challenge and take full advantage of the opportunities offered?

An OpenStack Cloud infrastructure is the answer. An OpenStack Cloud infrastructure is a cloud operating system and set of software tools – all managed through a dashboard – that control large pools of compute, storage and networking resources throughout a data center. It provides an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for your data center that gives your users access to automated pools of IT resources to run applications and workloads. It also gives you the flexibility to respond quickly and easily to new demands and provides a platform for increased innovation while helping you to control and reduce costs. And it gives you the flexibility to respond quickly and easily to new demands and provides the ideal platform for development and for increased innovation while helping you to control and reduce costs.

OpenStack is backed by a community of thousands of individual members, as well as leading software development and hosting companies. According to Gartner analysts, by 2019, OpenStack enterprise deployments will grow tenfold, up from just hundreds of production deployments today, due to increased maturity and growing ecosystem support.

SUSE OpenStack CloudSUSE OpenStack Cloud is an enterprise OpenStack distribution that rapidly deploys and easily manages highly available, mixed hypervisor IaaS clouds. It leverages existing data center investments to help enterprises increase business agility, economically scale current IT capabilities and easily consume future innovations.

Key BenefitsPain-Free Cloud Experience

Accelerate your time to value. Most businesses find the experience of building and maintaining their own OpenStack private cloud complicated and time-consuming. With the rapid design cycles and new releases of OpenStack code regularly arriving, customers are also faced with complex and disruptive upgrades. As the fastest and easiest OpenStack solution to deploy, maintain and manage, SUSE OpenStack Cloud takes the pain out of getting your private cloud up so you get real business benefits faster.

Reliable and Production Ready Because downtime isn’t an option. In today’s 24x7 environment, any service outage can have a far-reaching impact on your business. You need an IT infrastructure that is mature, robust and reliable. Many of the world’s most successful global companies trust OpenStack cloud as the platform for their business-critical workloads. SUSE has over 22 years’ experience delivering high-quality, hardened, open-source software solutions for business-critical environments.

SUSE OpenStack Cloud helps you avoid the pain of unplanned downtime, ensuring that your business can continue to access the key resources it needs. We can deliver the broadest hardware certification, the best interoperability and the most comprehensive application support.

Best Value Private Cloud Make the most of your IT budget. Unlike proprietary private cloud offerings, OpenStack is built using open source software code. This means that you avoid the pain of vendor lock-in, giving you the freedom to choose the best partner while keeping costs under control and getting the best value solution.

SUSE OpenStack Cloud allows you to Bring Your Own Hypervisor (BYOH). This is achieved by supporting the widest mixed hypervisor support available, including KVM, XEN, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere. This protects your investment by allowing existing virtualized workloads to be easily migrated to your private cloud while also driving business innovation with new cloud-based application development.


Two Reasons why OpenStack has a Business Model that Works for the Customer (Not the Vendor)

SUSE Expert Mark Smith Ever since Richard Stallman—that legendary stalwart of the Free Software Movement—started the GNU

project in 1983, open source software has generated intensely polarized, even passionate, opinions. With a wide divide between those in favor and those against, there is no shortage of people willing to share a negative opinion about the opposing camp—particularly when it comes to business models.

Perhaps the movement wasn’t helped by the appearance of its early leaders; after all, Stallman himself looks, dresses and even talks like Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. So perhaps he and others of his ilk were easy targets to dismiss simply as some kind of nerdy hippies, not a serious business proposition. Serious business people, after all, wear suits and look, well, serious.

It’s not tough to see why proprietary software vendors might fear open source. For them, open source is an existential threat: if your business model is based on the ownership of code, then the concept of it being available free of charge to your customers and freely available for anyone

who wishes to work on and improve it is not something you are going to be comfortable with. You’re giving this stuff away? You’re kidding, right? You can’t be serious: either that or it must be defective! Surely there’s some kind of law against that—and if there isn’t, we better get one passed quick!

Well, whether the proprietary vendors like it not, open source is here to stay: consistently making headway into the enterprise world, consistently getting better, consistently saving customer’s money and consistently adding value. In fact, these trends are so obvious that many proprietary vendors are now actively embracing open source. There’s a growing spirit of collaboration and cooperation as more of them see the value of leveraging the open source model.

Here’s two reasons why OpenStack is going to flourish in the enterprise:

1. It’s cheaper and more flexible. Notice I didn’t say “free.” You might get the software for nothing, but you will need skilled engineers to support it. And quite possibly you are going to need advice and consultancy from a firm like SUSE. But those costs will be lower than the alternatives, and you will also get choice. Ever tried to fire a proprietary software vendor? It’s tougher than you think. OpenStack, on the other hand, is extremely portable. Don’t like your supplier? Fire them and get another—without a two-year exit strategy.

2. The sheer volume, motivation and expertise of developers on an open source project is quite simply staggering in comparison to proprietary software vendors.They’re just out-gunned. Plain and simple. And you know what: developers wear the same t-shirts and jeans whether they are coding for Oracle or an alfalfa co-operative; the suits are in Sales and Finance.

Me? I’m in the marketing team. In a company selling seriously good private cloud management with portability that is more flexible, cheaper and better than proprietary software. But, I don’t like folk music; I didn’t go to Woodstock; and while I do like classic rock, I’m sitting here in an office typing this in —you guessed it—a suit. Give SUSE a call; put your order on the table; and we’ll have your OpenStack cloud up and running tomorrow.

While dollars per gigabyte ($/GB) decline at an average of 25 percent each year, flat IT budgets are not enough to keep up with the estimated 40 percent annual growth in data. The net of this challenge is that IT needs to look for more economical ways to store their data.

Software-defined storage (SDS) is the solution to this significant business challenge. SDS is the process of separating the physical storage hardware (data plane) from the data storage management logic or “intelligence” (control plane). This storage solution requires no proprietary hardware components, enabling the use of off-the-shelf, low-cost commodity hardware.

CephCeph is one of the leading open source distributed software storage platforms. Ceph stores data on a single distributed computer cluster and provides interfaces for object-, block- and file-level storage. It delivers excellent

performance, reliability and scalability—all while providing maximum compatibility with legacy applications. These capabilities, combined with the self-managing and self-healing features of Ceph clusters, make it ideal for Software-Defined Data Centers.

SUSE Enterprise Storage, powered by CephSUSE Enterprise Storage, powered by Ceph, is a highly scalable and resilient software-based storage solution, which enables organizations to build cost-efficient and highly scalable storage using commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives. It is a self-healing and self-managing solution that delivers storage functionality comparable to mid- and high-end storage products at a fraction of the cost. It also scales from a terabyte to a multi-petabyte storage network. This unlimited scalability enables enterprise IT organizations to deliver the agility businesses demand by non-disruptively adding capacity at the cost they want to pay while enabling storage administrators to minimize the amount of time spent managing storage.

Software-defined Scalable Storage


Features of SUSE Enterprise Storage

SUSE Expert Dobrin Dobrev Simon Graphics is a design studio generating huge numbers of image and video files, so they are getting close to the

limits of their proprietary storage solution. While this has worked well for them, it is a legacy from the company they acquired and is unaffordable to upgrade with fairly complex management. Their storage requirements are:

Expand existing capacity with mostly regular disks

Invest in some solid-state devices for faster data access

Have some logic which automatically configures which data is accessed more often and makes it faster to access

Enable policy-defined data redundancy between their onsite and remote location file storage

SUSE Enterprise Storage can do all this—very easily.SUSE Enterprise Storage is a highly scalable and resilient software-based storage solution. Based on Ceph, it scales to infinity while its self-healing and self-managing features let businesses add capacity at very reasonable cost and with little effort.

What’s new with SUSE Enterprise Storage 2?iSCSI block level access support for VMWare, Windows,

UNIX and other heterogeneous operating systems

Disk-level data encryption with flexible placement for the key value

Data cache tiering with support for multiple performance or availability levels within a single cluster

Erasure coding for space-efficient redundancy—works a lot like a configurable network RAID with more control and less cost

Thin provisioning for optimized data utilization

Copy-on-write clones for application rollback

Object and block data access for unified data access

Three Reasons Why the Future of Storage is Open Source and Cloud Analysts predict massive growth in software defined storage in the coming year—and with solid reasoning. The capacity to pool storage across different arrays and applications is the latest wave in virtualization and is expected to have the same impact on the cost and upgrade cycles for storage as it has had on servers.

While the growth of software defined storage isn’t good news for traditional vendors, it is very good news for IT teams, who stand to gain unlimited scale, reduced costs and non-proprietary management. Open source means the end of vendor lock-in and true cloud portability.

The future of storage is open source and cloud. Here are three reasons why:

1. What IT teams have learned to expect from virtualization: reduced cost, reduced vendor dependence.A decade or so ago, date centers looked very different from today. Each application had its own servers and storage working in a series of technological islands, with each island provisioned with enough processing power to run comfortably during peak demand. Inevitably, making sure systems ran comfortably at peak meant over-provisioning: the processing requirements had to be based on the worst case scenario, effectively providing for seasonal peaks like Christmas all year round. For years IT added application after application, requiring server after server, rack upon rack, over an ever greater floor space, running up an ever increasing electricity bill from epic power and cooling costs. This was so great that some companies could use the data center to heat their buildings, and others placed data centers in the cold air of mountain sides to reduce costs.

With every server added, the amount of idle processing power grew until the unused potential became massive.The effect was somewhat like placing a dam across a mighty river: the tiniest trickle of water escapes in front while the energy potential building in the lake behind grows and grows. Virtualization opened the sluice gates, unleashing a torrent of processing power that could be used for new applications. This meant power on demand at the flick of a switch, fast provisioning, doing more with less, lower energy bills, reduced data center footprint and severing the link between the software supplier and the hardware. Expensive proprietary

servers were out; commodity servers differentiated only by price were in. In this world the best server is the cheapest because now they are all the same. Best of all, there’s a huge drop in the number of new physical servers required. And with all that unused potential available why add more?

Virtualization became a “no brainer,” a technology with a business case so sound, so obvious, so clear that adoption was immediate and near universal. For the IT team, it means making better use of IT resources, reducing vendor lock-in and, above all, cost savings. Put the v-word in front of anything, and IT expects the vendor to show how they are going to be able to do more with less. Years of experience and working best practice have led IT teams to make virtualization synonymous with cost reduction. Storage is no exception. Any vendor talking about storage virtualization while asking for increased investment is going to have a very short conversation with their customers.

2. Storage virtualization disrupts traditional vendor business models.While IT has reaped the benefits of better resource use and cost reductions, this has come at the expense of sales for vendors. As adoption of server virtualization took off, server sales plummeted, moving from a steady gain in volume and value every quarter to a catastrophic drop. In 2009, with the recession in full force (itself a significant driver of virtualization for cost savings) analysts at IDC recorded the first-ever drop in server sales. All the big players, HP, IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) and Fujitsu, recorded huge decreases in sales, between 18.8 percent and 31.2 percent year over year. The impact was softer in high power CISC and RISC segments where it was tougher for IT teams to change vendors (e.g., with mission-critical Oracle applications licensing costs were tied to the number of processors in use or specific hardware), but especially severe in the lower end x86 market.

Changes followed suit. IBM exited the commodity market altogether, selling out to Lenovo, which, with a cheaper manufacturing base built on lower wages and controlled exchange rates were in a better position to win. HP endured a merry-go-round of revolving door CEOs and successive reinventions, and Dell went private. This pattern of disruptive change is set to follow into the storage marketplace.

When even the very largest suppliers suffer in this way, an expectation builds of disruptive, game-changing technology. IT buyers stop looking at brand in the same way. Where there used to be a perception of safe partners with a long-

term, safe product road maps and low risk, there is now an expectation that the older players are going to be challenged by new companies with new approaches and technologies. The famous 70s slogan “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” doesn’t hold water when IBM shuts up shop and sells its commodity servers business. IT buyers expect the same disruption in storage, and they are right to do so.

In this environment, the status quo for storage vendors cannot hold. The big players are nervously eying each other, waiting for the deciding moves in what adds up to a game of enterprise business poker with astronomical odds. The old proprietary business model is a busted flush, and they all know that sooner or later someone will call their bluff on price and locked-in software. A new player in the game, or even somebody already at the table, is going to bring the game into a new phase—or, as distinguished Gartner analyst and VP Joe Skorupa put it, “throw the first punch” in 2016.

3. Cloud makes the case for open source compelling because data must be portable.Just at the point where server sales might have been expected to recover, IT teams discovered the cloud. Why bother maintaining an enormous hardware estate with all the hassle of patching and managing, upgrading, retiring and replacing if you can offload that workload cost-effectively onto a third party and so free up time to concentrate on more rewarding activity? For ambitious CIOs wanting to generate business advantage for the board, “keeping the lights on” in the data center is a distant priority. It’s no wonder more and more infrastructure is moving into the cloud and, with it, data. And with the data goes storage.

IT teams who want to avoid being locked into cloud suppliers need to think carefully about how they exit one provider and move to another. Smart buyers need to play suppliers off against each other, compare prices and offerings and choose whichever is the best fit for their current requirements, knowing that those requirements can change. A better offer can come along, and, if you are going to be in a position to seize it, you must be able to exit your current supplier without a disruptive, costly and risky migration. If this goal is to be achieved, data must be portable.

Smart storage buyers need data portability to have an exit plan, and open source provides it. Storage powered by Ceph is easily transferred across hundreds of different providers, including Amazon.


Docker is a Linux container technology that can support your development and operations requirements for fast, consistent application implementations. Docker is open source technology that automates the deployment of applications inside software containers. It provides an additional layer of abstraction and automation of OS-level virtualization on Linux. Using Docker and Linux containers is a great way to more quickly build, deploy and manage applications. In the Software-Defined Data Center we can use Docker to more quickly deliver services across multiple platforms.

Docker and SUSEBefore virtualization, to bring up a new server took days. Virtualization reduced the time to minutes; now with containers and Docker, it takes just seconds.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 includes support for Docker, an open source technology that automates the deployment of applications inside Linux containers, without additional cost.

Docker from SUSE provides customers with enterprise-focused features and easy-to-use tools that improve operational efficiency and allow you to more easily and fully use innovations in the Docker space.

Enterprise Ready. Your enterprise needs more than what a regular open source project offers.

SUSE:• Provides pre-built images that are built from

trusted sources• Supports an on-premise registry that resides behind your

firewall with authorization function

• Enables you to meet compliance requirements with SUSE tooling that’s part of the OS, to perform audits and inspect the images of containers, including running containers

With enterprise-quality support in your production environment, Docker from SUSE is ready for your enterprise.

Operational Efficiency. Docker provides an agile development environment to quickly and reliably deliver business applications across multiple cloud and non-cloud environments with the highly automated configuration and management of these complex architectures.

By making Docker available on hybrid architectures including x86-64, IBM POWER (LE) and IBM z Systems, SUSE provides you optimal choices to improve operational efficiency.

Easy to Use. SUSE offers easy-to-use tools:• YaST and others allow you to build, deploy and

manage Docker.• Portus, an open source tool, provides a simple UI

for your on-premise registry with search and c ollaboration capabilities.

• In the near future, customers can use the same SUSE Manager UI to manage Docker images as well as VMs.

What’s more, you can also make the most out of your existing ISV application certifications on SUSE and run them in a containerized fashion. Rest assured: with SUSE’s promise to make it easy for Docker deployment and management.

Docker and Containers Containers have a long history in computing. They were initially introduced in the UNIX age and can still be seen in some UNIX platforms today. Unlike hypervisor virtualization, where one or more independent machines run virtually on physical hardware via an intermediation layer, containers instead run in user space on top of an operating system’s kernel. As a result, container virtualization is often called “operating system (OS)-level virtualization.”

Lightweight Virtualization with Docker ContainersEnter software-defined storage from SUSE powered by Ceph.

Software defined storage separates the physical storage plane from the data storage logic (or control plane). This approach eliminates the need for proprietary hardware and can generate 50 percent cost savings compared to traditional arrays and appliances.

SUSE Enterprise Storage is powered by Ceph, the most popular OpenStack distributed storage solution in the marketplace. It is extensively scalable from storage appliance to cost-effective cloud solution. It is portable across different OpenStack cloud providers.

Ceph’s foundation is the Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store (RADOS), which provides your applications with object, block and file system storage in a single, unified storage cluster. This makes Ceph flexible, highly reliable and easy for you to manage.

Ceph’s RADOS provides extraordinary data storage scalability: thousands of client hosts or KVMs accessing petabytes to exabytes of data. Each one of your applications can use the object, block or file system interfaces to the same RADOS cluster simultaneously. This means your Ceph storage system serves as a flexible foundation for all of your data storage needs.

As of the Firefly release, Ceph provides industry-leading storage functionality such as unified block and object, thin provisioning, erasure coding and cache tiering. What’s more, Ceph is self-healing and self-managing.

With Ceph’s powerful capabilities, SUSE Enterprise Storage is significantly less expensive to manage and administer than proprietary systems. It will enable you to effectively manage even a projected data growth rate of 40–50 percent in your organization without exceeding your established IT budget


SUSE has been supporting Linux containers since SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2 was introduced in 2012. This technology provides customers with highly efficient and low overhead OS-level virtualization. Also, it’s designed to work well with other virtualization technologies supported by the distribution.

Docker, an open-source engine that automates the deployment of applications into containers, adds an application deployment engine on top of a virtualized container execution environment. It’s designed to provide a lightweight and fast environment in which to run your code as well as an efficient workflow to get that code from your laptop to your test environment and then into production, minimizing incompatibility issues. On a very high level, Docker is:

Lightweight and easy. Docker is fast. You can quickly create containers running your applications. Most Docker containers take less than a second to launch. And as recent research* shows, containers have near-native performance. This is thanks to the removal of the overhead of the hypervisor. Moreover, Docker offers an advanced multi-layered unification file system (AUFS) that allows efficient disk utilization and easy OS resource sharing.

Application-centric. Docker focuses on application output without worrying about virtual system details, so it’s a highly developer-friendly methodology. Docker is designed to enhance consistency by ensuring the environment in which your developers write code matches the environments into which your applications are deployed.

Fast, efficient deployment life cycle. Docker aims to reduce the cycle time between code being written and code being tested, deployed and used. It aims to make your applications portable, easy to build and easy to collaborate on.

Enterprise Use Cases for Docker As a new technology, Docker is evolving. And its use cases in enterprises are evolving, too. Here are some typical cases:

DevOps. Docker is ideal for quickly setting up development and test environments as well as sandboxes. Compared to a VM, it’s more efficient with less overhead. In addition, Docker offers better segregation of duties for DevOps to improve efficiency; developers need to focus only on their applications running inside containers while operations focuses on managing the containers. Finally, Docker can

be easily integrated into a devops tool stack such as Jenkins to achieve better workflow automation and continuous integration.

Server consolidation. The low overhead and layered image system of Docker containers improve the server consolidation ratio. By removing a guest OS, Docker containers can have two to three times the density (number of virtual environments) of a regular VM. This provides many benefits to customers, e.g., hosting companies that want to reduce their costs by running more virtual environments on existing hardware platforms.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and managed services. Docker can be used to build a multi-tenant PaaS infrastructure because it is easy and inexpensive to create isolated environments for running multiple instances of app tiers for each tenant. This is possible given the spin-up speed of Docker environments and effective tools. Also, Docker helps to run stand-alone services and applications consistently across multiple environments, a capability especially useful in service-oriented architectures (SOA) and deployments that rely heavily on micro-services.

Docker in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is designed to provide better operational efficiencies to enterprise customers by including best-of-breed open source technologies. Just like its support of Linux containers and dual hypervisors, namely Xen and KVM, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, the latest major version, includes support for Docker as a complementary virtualization option with the following advantages for customers:

Enterprise-ready. Fully supported with a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 subscription, Docker from SUSE is enterprise-ready. It provides pre-built images from a standard repository, a trusted source that is verified and distributed by SUSE. What’s more, you can set up an on-premise registry behind the enterprise firewall, minimizing exposure to malicious attacks and have better control of your IP. Portus, an open source front-end for an on-premise Docker registry, is included as a technology preview. With Portus, you can have authorization, as well as a user interface and search functions, for your on-premise Docker registry, improving security and productivity. The authorization function of Portus allows enterprise users to control the access to Docker images and enhances data security.

Improves operational efficiency. Docker and containers from SUSE allow you to complement existing virtualization technologies to improve operational efficiency. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has already included Xen and KVM support as hypervisor options. It is a perfect guest to run in virtual and cloud environment, too. With Docker in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, you may build, ship and run containerized applications in physical, virtual or cloud environments, wherever it makes sense for you in terms of cost and efficiency.

Easy-to-use tools. SUSE offers easy-to-use tools to build, deploy and manage Docker. YaST has been the most efficient management framework for SUSE Linux Enterprise. Now you can use the YaST interface to get a simple overview of the available Docker images, run Docker containers and easily control running containers. Besides the build tools included in Docker, you can get KIWI, a flexible golden-image building tool that allows you to configure once and create output formats including Docker. SUSE also offers a convenience tool called “sle2docker” that can be used to activate pre-built images delivered by SUSE.

Better security, compliance and life cycle management. The integration with SUSE Manager, a comprehensive tool for Linux management, will make it possible to patch and update Docker images in the registry. With this feature, customers will have better control of the security, compliance and life cycle of Docker images.

Docker is planned to be available on more hardware architectures such as IBM POWER and IBM zSystem. The current Docker offering is based on x86_64 only.

Docker containers’ integration with SUSE OpenStack Cloud. With this integration, you can leverage the SUSE OpenStack Cloud functions of automation and self-service to manipulate containers just like you manipulate “regular” VMs.

Increased integration with the Open Build Service, an open system for building and distributing Linux images, including Docker, in an automatic, consistent and productive way. The integration aims to provide an easy image “building environment that can be used to provide always up-to-date images.

Learn the Technology. Certify your Learning.SUSE training and certification is transforming learners into professionals through powerful courses that unlock opportunities in technology.

TrainingImprove your skills, or the skills of your team, with our hands-on, role-based training for IT professionals and developers. Master key tasks for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE OpenStack Cloud, SUSE Enterprise Storage, SUSE Manager, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and more.

CertificationSUSE Certifications are among the most relevant and useful in the IT industry. With a SUSE certification, you can easily show current employers your skills progression or impress a potential employer with your practical abilities with Linux as an operating system and SUSE Linux Enterprise as a distribution family.

SUSE currently offers the following certifications:SUSE CLA (Certified Linux Administrator)

SUSE CLP (Certified Linux Professional)

SUSE CLE (Certified Linux Engineer)

SUSE CLA and CLP certification exams are available via remote proctoring. As long as your computer and internet connection meet minimum requirements, you may take the exam from your home at a date and time of your choosing. No software is installed on your machine; you just need a stable internet connection, the Chrome or Chromium browser and have a webcam and microphone.

Interested in SUSE Training & Certification?

Take a look at training.suse.com.


Altran wanted to deploy an authentication gateway without the cost and complexity of setting up internal infrastructure. It chose a solution based on SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server virtual servers running on Microsoft Azure. The Azure cloud provided secure, high-availability support for Altran’s virtual servers— complementing the built-in capabilities of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and giving the company the ability to scale its environment up or down in a flexible and highly cost-effective manner.

OverviewA leading global engineering consulting company, Altran specializes in helping customers in the aerospace, automotive, energy, railways, finance, healthcare and telecom industries with innovation and high-tech projects. Headquartered in France, it operates in more than 20 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas.

ChallengeAltran has approximately 550 employees in the Nordic region, most of them consultants. Assigning the right consultants to each project—based on their skills and experience—is critical to ensuring successful outcomes. To give its sales and client management teams a clear, up-to-date picture of each consultant’s skills and experience, Altran requires them to maintain a detailed electronic résumé.

Ivar Lyse, Business Manager at Altran, said: “We are a business that deals primarily in ideas and other intellectual property, so naturally our consultants are our most important asset. We had built an application to store all résumés, enabling them to edit their own data and client managers to search for the appropriate skills, and we wanted to protect this with an access management solution.”

For this résumé application in the Nordics, Altran wanted a platform that was highly flexible and scalable as well as quick and easy to set up and maintain.

SolutionAltran chose Access Manager from Micro Focus to provide web-based authentication for users. The plan was to hook the solution to Altran’s existing Microsoft Active directory landscape.

“We wanted to run Access Manager on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to take advantage of that platform’s natural security and stability,” said Ivar Lyse. “We were already familiar with the Microsoft Azure cloud and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from other projects, and when we saw that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server images were available on Azure, we never considered any other option.”

Altran set up several Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server: one as the access gateway, one as the identity provider and one as the administration console. This cloud environment runs the Access Manager portion of the résumé application.

“The initial set-up was very simple: we just selected the virtual CPU, memory and disk resources we needed for each Azure Virtual Machine, and then installed the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server image,” said Ivar Lyse. “We then downloaded and installed the ISO for Access Manager and got started. The IT team was involved in the project and helped us to connect the new Access Manager environment with Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS).”

With its access management solution running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on Microsoft Azure, Altran benefits from flexible monthly pricing based on its usage of virtual computing resources and the ability to scale the solution up or down as required.

“Keeping the operating system updated is simple: we just accept the standard patches that come through the SUSE update channel, exactly as if the servers were running in-house,” said Ivar Lyse. “With Azure, it’s very easy to access and manage our virtual environments; for example, there’s no need set up a VPN.”

Customer Case StudiesResultsRunning on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in the Azure cloud gives Altran what it wanted: a fully flexible, highly available platform for providing round-the-clock access to its résumé application. And the seamless integration of the SUSE operating system with Microsoft Azure results in an easily managed cloud environment. Employees are securely authenticated by Access Manager, and a free-text search within the application makes it simple for client managers to find the right people for each client requirement.

“Putting the solution on Azure removed a whole layer of complexity and cost,” said Ivar Lyse. “We didn’t need to invest in our own dedicated server hardware, and we can easily and cost-effectively scale up the solution. For example, we plan to move to a clustered environment in the future to make the service even more robust, and this is simple to set up in Azure.”

Avoiding the in-house route also removed the burden of firewall and server administration. This allowed Altran to focus on the application rather than the underlying infrastructure.

“The Azure management console provides an intuitive visual overview of the status and health of our servers, so the environment is easy to manage,” said Ivar Lyse. “We could have chosen another platform to run Access Manager, but we were confident that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server would offer greater stability and availability. Our experience so far certainly confirms this to be the case.”

Altran


Apollo-Optik

To maintain its competitive advantage, Apollo-Optik needed to implement a retail IT solution, ready to cope with future challenges. Streamlining its development and deployment processes, Apollo-Optik joined forces with SUSE Pre-Sales and SUSE partner B1 Systems to design and implement a fully integrated system based on SUSE® Linux Enterprise Point of Service, SUSE Manager and the Open Build Service solution. Today, new releases can be rolled out faster and more flexibly, improving the customer experience.

OverviewApollo-Optik, a leading optical retailer headquartered in Schwabach in Germany, operates 800 branches and franchise stores across Germany. Thanks to its strong local presence, customers can always find an Apollo-Optik store nearby.

Apollo-Optik is part of the international GrandVision group that has stores in more than 40 countries throughout Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia and is one of the largest optical retailers in the world.

ChallengeTo maintain its strong position, Apollo-Optik needed a retail IT solution, ready to cope with future challenges. At a time when sales channels are converging, driving increasing demand for integrated customer service across online platforms and local stores, the company wanted to accelerate and simplify deployment processes to push innovative services out to customers more rapidly.

Continuous expansion from 250 to 800 stores had left Apollo-Optik with an IT solution that was unable to keep pace with business growth. This custom-built solution with error-prone deployment and distribution procedures was difficult to manage and offered limited control.

With 800 distributed and independent servers, the company suffered from complex dependency management, because core business applications needed to support a broad range of technologies. Erich Ehbauer, CIO at Apollo-Optik says, “The heterogeneous server landscape gave our developers a very hard time. Our outdated systems slowed down time-to-market for new features, and we risked falling behind the competition.”

SolutionTo get its IT services up to speed, Apollo-Optik engaged with SUSE Pre-Sales, SUSE Premium Partner B1 Systems and other consulting and implementation partners to design and implement a fully integrated release management and deployment solution based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Point

of Service software in combination with SUSE Manager and the Open Build Server solution.

Stefan Thema, Teamlead Open Infrastructure Conceptions at Apollo-Optik, said, “We selected SUSE because we could integrate SUSE Manager with existing processes much more easily than other management systems, thanks to its powerful programming interface. The integrated Xen hypervisor saves a huge amount in license fees and was ideal for rolling out a consistent virtualization solution to our branches.”

B1 Systems supported Apollo-Optik throughout and after the project. The partner enabled a smooth and automated workflow by developing a customized application integration platform based on B1-Glue API to connect SUSE Manager to the company’s Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP system, which provides master data and configuration details for the local store servers.

B1 Systems also connected the source control system used by application developers at Apollo-Optik to the Open Build Service to ensure reliable packaging of new releases. To provide an automated and uninterrupted process flow, B1 Systems integrated the Open Build Service with SUSE Manager, making new releases immediately available for testing.

ResultsApollo-Optik can now support its large server landscape much more efficiently, while standardized packaging, deployment and installation processes have improved overall reliability. A more transparent view of both the IT landscape and software management processes has increased operational security and improved governance.

Stefan Thema said, “In the past, staff needed to monitor installation of new branch servers and make sure that everything was working. Today, with just two clicks, the solution automatically creates tailored installation instructions for a new server including all required application configurations. As soon as the box is plugged into the network, all of the required software is installed by SUSE AutoYaST, complete with virtualization, without any user interaction, finished in 45 minutes per install. This automation helps reduce errors and ensures standardized installations, speeding up the process significantly.”

Thanks to the integrated packaging of test releases into this continuous provisioning and maintenance solution, software developers can easily try out new features. Developers can start the packaging process directly by committing certain flags to the version control system. In a matter of seconds, the code gets packaged and the release can easily be installed for software testing. And when a new release gets approved, it is instantly available for automated deployment.

Erich Ehbauer said, “The SUSE environment implemented by B1 Systems effectively decouples software release cycles from hardware refresh lifecycles, giving us greater flexibility to deliver new functionality at the point-of-sale much more quickly. Today, we can deploy software updates more rapidly, keeping pace with a fastmoving business environment, and we have streamlined application development by reducing legacy dependencies. Ultimately, the ability to integrate different sales channels much more closely will improve the customer experience and provide a competitive edge.”


Knowing the benefits of OpenStack cloud technology, but recognizing that few businesses have the in-house skills or knowledge to access these benefits, Datalounges used the SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5 platform to build a managed cloud services environment for companies of all sizes. With enterprise-class support on offer from Datalounges, even small businesses can now take advantage of OpenStack technologies to create powerful, flexible and cost-efficient virtual infrastructures.

OverviewHeadquartered in Finland, Datalounges is a cloud service provider that offers entire cloud infrastructures to businesses. The company uses open-source OpenStack technologies to deliver powerful and flexible resources to its customers, giving them the ability to reduce their IT costs, boost service levels and cut time to market.

ChallengeFor a growing number of companies, running IT infrastructure in-house is a costly distraction from core business activities. Even where companies can afford to maintain the necessary in-house skills, deploying fixed internal infrastructure promotes inflexibility and absorbs capital that could be better invested elsewhere. In both cases, buying cloud infrastructure as a service can provide a good alternative—but management challenges often remain.

Kai Kankaala—Board advisor, Sales—at Datalounges, explains: “Global cloud providers offer virtual capacity only—typically giving little or no support to businesses. Datalounges was established to address this gap in the market, and in particular to make the benefits of the OpenStack platform easily accessible to companies of all sizes. The OpenStack technology is superb, but the learning curve is very steep and deployment is tricky for the uninitiated.”

Datalounges also recognized that exposing the OpenStack APIs would make it easy for companies to host their own cloud services on the Datalounges platform—an enormous opportunity for creating new revenue streams.

SolutionDatalounges selected SUSE OpenStack Cloud as its strategic platform for delivering enterprise cloud services, adding on full consultation and support services backed by rigorous service-level agreements (SLAs).

“SUSE OpenStack Cloud has been our cloud services platform from day one,” says Kankaala. “We also tested pure OpenStack and the Red Hat variant. The SUSE option was superior in terms of pricing, the enterprise-level support and built-in automation features. We want to be the best OpenStack cloud computing service provider in Finland. That’s why we partnered with SUSE.”

The emphasis on providing complete, fully supported infrastructures rather than just individual servers has helped Datalounges grow rapidly. The company’s private cloud landscape runs on 64 dedicated HP blades, and customers can choose anything between a fully managed and a self-managed solution, depending on their technical maturity. Datalounges uses SUSE Manager to provide end-to-end cover for the fully managed environments, and is developing its own tool—based on OpenStack Ceilometer—for managing and automating virtual infrastructure. In response to customer preferences, Datalounges offers fixed monthly pricing for a given set of resources.

“Our customers are all looking for a flexible and cost-effective provider of computing power, and most often they don’t want the overhead of managing their own environments,” says Kankaala. “The combination of our experienced support and the robust SUSE OpenStack Cloud platform translates into extremely high reliability and performance. With the SUSE platform, we benefit from built-in high availability features and fast deployment, so we can get new customers up and running very rapidly.”

Companies can connect their in-house infrastructure to the Datalounges cloud infrastructure, enabling them to ramp up their capacity at short notice—for example, to address seasonal spikes in demand on a transactional website.

“SUSE OpenStack Cloud gives our customers the power to do anything they want,” says Kankaala. “We are seeing rapid growth in customers building their own revenue-generating services on our platform: they focus on their business opportunity, and we provide the robust cloud service that underpins it.”

ResultsUsing SUSE OpenStack Cloud, Datalounges has successfully brought the power and flexibility of OpenStack technologies within the reach of all businesses. The offering enables companies to rapidly and cost-effectively deploy cloud infrastructure and build new services—all backed by excellent support and robust SLAs.

“With the latest release, OpenStack has really come of age,” says Kankaala. “We are getting the message out to businesses that it’s mature, reliable, highly sophisticated and fully ready for production landscapes. Of course, it is not a simple solution—but with our expertise and the enhancements in the SUSE product, we can bring all of the advantages to our customers without any of the complexity.”

Compared to classic approaches to building out infrastructure, SUSE OpenStack Cloud gives Datalounges the ability to work at lightning speed.

“With a few clicks of a mouse, we can build dozens of servers for a customer in a matter of minutes,” says Kankaala. “This supports our fast growth, and ensures that we can help our customers get business value from OpenStack incredibly quickly.”

Datalounges


Recognizing the growing importance of cloud computing for both commercial and public-sector organizations, Epitech Marseille wanted to offer its students practical, hands-on experience in setting up and managing cloud services. By switching to SUSE OpenStack Cloud, the organization benefits from a more packaged approach to OpenStack, one that is bundled with additional tools and documentation to simplify set-up and management and, as a result, help its students to build vital skills that will advance their future IT careers.

OverviewEstablished in 1999 and with 12 sites spread throughout France, Epitech is the country’s leading specialist institution for education in computer science. It accepts post-baccalauréat (roughly equivalent to US high-school diploma) students for five-year courses designed to prepare them for careers in enterprise technology—and 100% of its graduates go on to employment after graduation.

ChallengeThe ability of Epitech graduates to get desirable employment rivals the graduates of the group of elite French universities known as the “Grandes Ecoles”. To maintain its reputation as the best preparatory institution for a successful career in information technology, Epitech continually adapts and evolves its curriculum to keep pace with changes in the professional world.

Acknowledging the importance of cloud technologies for businesses and non-commercial organizations alike, Epitech wanted to give its students a firm grounding in creating and

running private cloud infrastructures. This would also be an opportunity to give students cost-effective virtual workspaces where they can run their own software projects.

Roxan Roumegas, Director of Epitech Marseille, said: “We decided to deploy OpenStack in our cloud hub, so that we could run an internal private cloud—both to provide virtual resources to students and to give students experience in setting up and running the private cloud. However, we ran into configuration and deployment challenges with the standard community edition.”

SolutionEpitech Marseille wanted an OpenStack environment that could be easily understood and maintained even by first-year students fresh from high school and with no previous experience. By switching to SUSE OpenStack Cloud, the organization was able to benefit from a more packaged approach to OpenStack, bundled with additional tools and documentation to simplify set-up and management.

“SUSE OpenStack Cloud resolved the difficulties we had experienced in setting up and supporting the community version,” said Roxan Roumegas. “While it’s good in general terms to learn the art of configuration, it wasn’t appropriate to drop first-year students straight into a highly complex environment.”

Stéphane Mombuleau, Manager of the Cloud Hub at Epitech Marseille and a fifth year student, said: “SUSE OpenStack Cloud provides the right learning curve to enable our students to quickly build practical skills that will serve them in their future careers. Naturally, those who are interested in the stack can dig deeper, but there’s no frustration for students who just want to get up and running quickly.”

Epitech Marseille connected with hosted services provider Jaguar Network through La French Tech—a leading French startup community. Jaguar Network delivered the server platform for SUSE OpenStack Cloud at Epitech Marseille. In addition to providing virtual sandbox environments for student projects, the private cloud supports production environments.

“Our intranet runs entirely on OpenStack, as does a new system for student identification based on RFID cards,” said Stéphane Mombuleau. “We also offer virtualization on the fly for student projects, giving them the OS and software of their choice.”

The exposure of students to open source technologies does not end there: all of Epitech’s desktop machines run the open-SUSE operating system, so each year’s intake of 1,000 students quickly gets to grips with Linux.

ResultsHands-on experience in using SUSE OpenStack Cloud gives students at Epitech Marseille a thorough grounding in cloud architecture, solution design, server deployment and systems administration. “SUSE OpenStack Cloud completely opens students’ minds to what goes on in today’s data centers and how systems are administered,” said Roxan Roumegas. “When they set up solutions for their future employers, they will be using the practical skills they developed at Epitech in areas such as server virtualization.”

The latest version of SUSE OpenStack Cloud is focused on ensuring ease of use for cloud administrators. This helps Epitech Marseille’s students to hit the ground running and avoid becoming bogged down in frustrating configuration challenges. As they learn more about setting up and administering private cloud environments, the ease of using SUSE OpenStack Cloud keeps them engaged, working productively and, as a result, learning more effectively.

“It’s vital to engage students and maintain their interest by giving them professional tools that are actually used in business,” said Stéphane Mombuleau. “Because we use SUSE OpenStack Cloud to run our intranet and the student ID system, our student administrators gain practical experience in keeping production systems healthy and available.”

“Using SUSE OpenStack Cloud helps us to prepare students for working in a world where cloud technologies are increasingly important,” said Roxan Roumegas.

Epitech


Hostnordic

Hostnordic wanted to capture incremental business opportunities by adding Linux-based hosting products alongside its Microsoft portfolio. To maximize profitability, the company needed to deliver the Linux offering without increasing headcount in its support team. To solve the challenge, Hostnordic uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server solutions to provision, monitor and manage Linux servers via the Microsoft tools that its support teams are familiar with—avoiding the need to increase headcount by 20 percent.

OverviewFounded in 2006 in Viby, Denmark, Hostnordic is one of Scandinavia’s leading managed services providers. Employing more than 40 people, the company delivers a comprehensive range of hosting, remote backup and outsourcing services to businesses across the region.

ChallengeTo continue its rapid growth, Hostnordic wanted to complement the success of its Microsoft-based hosting products by adding virtual Linux servers.

Christian Osbahr, CTO at Hostnordic, said: “In recent years, we have seen increasing demand for end-to-end cloud solutions in our target markets. Many potential clients have a mixture of both Microsoft- and Linux-based servers in their infrastructures, and to help win new business we decided to extend our offering with Linux virtual servers.”

As the company moved forward with its growth strategy, ensuring the profitability of the new Linux offering was essential.

“Our infrastructure is based on software from the Microsoft System Center suite, and we have invested heavily in training our support team on this platform,” said Christian Osbahr. “We realized that if we had to manage a new Linux environment with separate systems and processes, we would have to increase our support headcount by up to 20 percent. This increase would raise our operational expenditure significantly, and harm the profitability of the new products. As a result, we were keen to find a Linux solution that would integrate tightly with our Microsoft environment.”

SolutionAfter assessing Linux distributions from a number of different vendors, Hostnordic selected SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE Manager and the SUSE Manager Management Pack for Microsoft System Center.

“One of the key reasons for selecting SUSE was its close relationship with Microsoft,” said Christian Osbahr. “We wanted the assurance of a partner that would take ownership of support requests and ensure that any technical issues were resolved in a timely manner. We felt that SUSE met our requirements perfectly.

“Another important criterion for the new solution was interoperability with our existing Microsoft environment. During a proof-of-concept exercise for the SUSE solutions, we saw with our own eyes that it was possible to integrate server monitoring data from SUSE Manager into our Microsoft Operations Manager tool by using the SUSE Manager Management Pack for Microsoft System Center.

“Moreover, we realized that the tight integration between the Microsoft and SUSE solutions would enable us to protect the new Linux servers without major modifications to our disaster recovery solution—helping us to avoid additional capital expenditure.”

During the implementation process, Hostnordic worked together with an expert team from SUSE business partners B1 Systems GmbH and Liga ApS.

“Throughout the deployment, the guidance we received from the SUSE, B1 Systems and Liga teams was invaluable,” said Christian Osbahr. “The B1 Systems team was on site for the week of the initial deployment, and together we configured the integrations between the SUSE Manager and Microsoft Operations Manager monitoring tools. During this process, the B1 Systems team ran training workshops with our support team, and communicated the skills required to manage the new Linux environment effectively.”

Today, Hostnordic manages its Microsoft and SUSE systems side by side via familiar processes and systems—avoiding cost and complexity, and enabling the company to offer total cloud hosting solutions to its clients.

ResultsBy extending its offering using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Hostnordic is increasing its competitiveness and driving its growth.

“In the past, we were forced to turn down business from customers with Linux servers looking for an end-to-end managed services product,” said Christian Osbahr. “Thanks to our SUSE solutions, we have brought our new hosting offering to market rapidly and cost-effectively, which enables us to broaden our reach and capitalize on valuable opportunities.”

Hostnordic’s SUSE solutions are closely integrated with its automated workflows for provisioning, management, maintenance, back up and disaster recovery, delivering the new capabilities at minimal incremental cost.

“Our support teams can manage the SUSE environment using additional fields in Microsoft Operations Manager, avoiding the need to bring in a separate support team for Linux,” said Christian Osbahr. “As a result, we can keep our operational costs lean while delivering the high-quality service that our clients have come to expect.”

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