Hitting Microsoft's metal: SUSE flings Enterprise Linux at SAP HANA on Azure

Fancy a slice of SLES for SAP?

SUSECON '19 Veteran Linux slinger SUSE kicked off its Nashville shindig, SUSECON 2019, with a slew of new tech to gladden the hearts of enterprise fans.

The first has seen the company dropping a cut of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) tailored for SAP HANA Large Instances on Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft is, of course, no stranger to SAP's boffo in-memory data and analytics platform, and has been cheerfully punting SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instances) for a while now. The gang at Redmond allows customers to get their hands on dedicated, bare metal servers in Azure's data centres on which to run the thing.

SUSE modestly considers itself to be the "leading Linux platform" for SAP HANA and, while neither it nor Microsoft will be drawn on how many of the Linux instances on Azure have a green chameleon tinge to them, Daniel Nelson, vice president of Products and Solutions for SUSE, told El Reg: "We see it growing for us faster than market growth."

There is therefore some logic to getting SUSE's SAP-certified, pre-configured platform onto Azure, which is where Microsoft would dearly like customers to bring their epic SAP HANA workloads.

The Azure server SKUs alone are impressive, starting at a paltry 36 Intel CPU cores and 768GB of memory and going up to 480 cores and 24TB. SUSE is working with Microsoft to get environments up to 60TB in size.

All aboard the Enterprise

As for why Microsoft and not the other bringers of fluffy white public cloud, Nelson told us the Windows giant "historically does a very good job of embracing the enterprise". And AWS and Google? "Neither of them has that kind of enterprise background."

SUSE CEO Nils Brauckmann agreed, and told us: "Microsoft is much more open to run[ning] a different operating system on their cloud because what they're interested in is to have those customers running on their, not on Amazon's, infrastructure."

Well, quite.

Nelson had some bad news for Linux-on-the-desktop obsessives, saying that while the Linux wrangler enjoyed a "a long-running and rich desktop environment", such a thing was "not the core focus of our business". The gang are all about the enterprise, with development efforts targeting the likes of Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry.

The love-in was reciprocated by Microsoft. KY Srinivasan, General Manager for the Enterprise Open Source Group at the Windows maker, said customers were keen on SLES for SAP "as the underlying operating system to ensure a reliable platform that is validated on Azure Large Instances". ®