Timed to coincide with the formal opening of SUSECon 2016, the company's annual conference which is being held in Washington DC, the upgrade brings together a host of features and fixes that, according to Olaf Kirch, vice-president of the company's research and development, will help the more than two-thirds of the Fortune Global 100, who use SUSE, along with other customers, to accelerate innovation, improve system reliability, meet security requirements and adapt to new technologies.

Both product manager Simona Arsene and product marketing manager Raj Meel said this release was a change from the former policy of releasing upgrades in small doses.

They said the testing of the new features had been opened to the public, not merely SUSE partners. Thus, they did not expect too many complaints when the service pack was applied.

Ten-fold increase in packet processing via software-defined networking that combines Open vSwitch with the Data Plane Development Kit. This is a key enabler for telecom providers to efficiently implement virtual network functions. Integration of DPDK provides a complete virtualisation solution for cloud and on-premise deployments.

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

Reduced downtime and improved I/O performance through persistent system memory applications using integrated NVDIMMs that save data in seconds and make data immediately
available on reboot.

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

Time- and resource-saving “skip service packs” functionality, which lets customers skip upgrades of prior service packs and jump straight to SP2 from SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.

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

Reduced downtime for large-memory IBM POWER-based systems via minimised memory initialization times for server restarts along with high availability and geo clustering support for IBM POWER.

Support for ARMv8-A, including enablement for the Raspberry Pi3, making SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 one of the first commercially available enterprise Linux platforms for this architecture.

Support for Intel’s scalable Omni-Path Architecture to deploy high performance computing workloads.

Simplified access to the latest packages and technologies via SUSE Package Hub integration with SUSE Customer Center, helping customers seamlessly obtain modules and package updates.

The writer is attending SUSECon 2016 as a guest of the company.