The changes, SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 2 and the latest in infrastructure management from SUSE Manager 4.1, are now available, the company said in a statement.

“SUSE solutions, including SUSE Linux Enterprise, are designed for IT transformation,” said Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE president of engineering and innovation.

“Customers stake their businesses on their IT infrastructure and we stake our business on their success.

"With SUSE and using true open source software, they can simplify their existing environments and ease the transformation that will allow them to take advantage of modern computing as they accelerate innovation in their businesses.”

The upgrades to SUSE Linux Enterprise will offer improved business continuity, with system uptime increased by up to 12 months with live patching, which is now also available for IBM Z and LinuxONE.

Live patching is SUSE-developed technology that enables the patching of a kernel without having to reboot a machine.

The second change includes cloud enhancements. with updated cloud images that make it easier for customers to use hyperscalers – Alibaba, AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft Azure and Oracle.

And finally, the new SUSE changes mean better security for Federal Government and other public sector customers as well as those running high-security environments with FIPS 140-2 certification-ready packages and support for a complete and secure offline installation for air-gapped deployments.

Michael Desens, vice-president of offering management, IBM Z and LinuxONE at IBM, said: “SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP2 adds support for new capabilities of IBM z15 and LinuxONE III, including IBM Secure Execution for Linux – a trusted execution environment that is designed to run large numbers of workloads in full isolation at scale, with enterprise-grade features engineered to protect sensitive data from internal and external threats across the hybrid cloud environment.

"SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP2 also includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching for IBM Z and LinuxONE, which can maximise system uptime and availability for mission-critical systems.”

SUSE said the upgrade also helped customers modernise their IT infrastructure by making legacy infrastructure more efficient and easing migration to cloud and multi-cloud.

The changes in SUSE Manager 4.1 and SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1 include expanded operating system support, cluster integration and management and enhanced usability, virtual machine management and monitoring capabilities, all of which are claimed to reduce costs and streamline management.

SUSE Manager is also able to scale to tens of thousands of client devices.

Other improvements to SUSE Linux Enterprise are greater operational efficiency and anytime/anywhere access to data through workflow automation and expanded hypervisor support from NVIDIA, putting more tools into the hands of data scientists and IT for managing artificial intelligence and edge workloads.

Support for NVIDIA Tegra X1 and Tegra X2 improve their use by data scientists, while support for the newest Raspberry Pi 4 enables reduced energy and heat dissipation while improving the installation process.

The changes also mean that users can migrate faster from the openSUSE Leap community distribution to supported SUSE Linux Enterprise with SP2 binaries made available on openSUSE Leap.

Finally, DevOps teams have been enabled with support for automation, project builds and message-oriented middleware, along with management and monitoring features such as RabbitMQ, Prometheus and Maven.