With support for the latest industry-standard hardware, RAS features and enhancements, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 3 gives you even more scale-up and scale-out options than ever before to run your mission-critical workloads. And since this service pack includes all of the patches released since its introduction in 2009, you'll have our most secure platform for delivering IT services reliably and cost-effectively.

New hardware support means more, and better, scale-up capabilities

In the past, your operating system and hardware choices were limited when implementing scale-up environments for running processor and I/O-intensive applications. Today, with Service Pack 3, you have much more choice.

Service Pack 3 supports the latest industry-standard, scale-up hardware, such as Intel® Xeon® processor E5 Family, the 4th generation Intel® Core™ processor and AMD Opteron™ 4000 and 6000 Series Platform, as well as PCI Express SSD cards. With up to 4096 logical CPUs, 16TiB RAM support (on certified hardware), and high-speed interconnect, these new systems coupled with Service Pack 3 are the ideal scale-up choice when modernizing your aging, expensive RISC/UNIX infrastructure. See which systems are supported.

Service Pack 3 includes the latest open source hypervisors, KVM 1.4 and Xen 4.2, with increased virtual CPU and memory limits. It also supports large VT-d pages and larger 256GB shared memory segments for improved virtualization performance. As a result, Service Pack 3 is the ideal platform for consolidating your resource-intensive workloads onto virtualized host servers. Learn more.

Achieve better scale-out with storage, file system and networking enhancements

Some distributed workloads, like web servers, are best delivered using scale-out systems, where horizontal scalability is achieved by adding computing nodes to networks with shared storage. With Service Pack 3, you can leverage cost-effective server hardware and construct both highly elastic and highly available IT infrastructure in your data center, in the cloud, or both.

Service Pack 3 supports the latest open source high speed interconnects, protocols and adapters for improved communication between your scale-out solution components. It has updated drivers for the modules below, ensuring your scale-out systems deliver maximum performance.

    8G/16G fiber channel adapters
    10G/40G Ethernet adapters
    New iSCSI target (LIO) support
    Improved Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
    Data Center Bridging (DCB)
    Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED 1.5.4)

Updated LVM support with improved thin provisioning helps you better optimize shared storage usage while btrfs enhancements include quota support for subvolumes and faster snapshotting, improving administrator efficiency and speed. Learn more.

Service Pack 3 expands the IPv6 support for Network File System (NFS). IPv6 support for NFSv4 was introduced on SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 2. Now Service Pack 3 also includes IPv6 support for NFSv3, benefiting current NFS deployments and improving interoperability.

Service Pack 3 also includes the most up-to-date clustering stack and is now available for x86 (32 bit and 64 bit), Itanium, POWER and System z architectures. SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 11 Service Pack 3 supports the scale-out of network services like web servers with the latest IP load balancing features including connection tracking for a transparent fail over, to ensure you meet the most stringent service-level agreements (SLAs). Geo clustering enhancements include improved support for physical, virtual and hybrid clustering, giving you greater deployment flexibility. Learn more.

Scale up or scale out and run your mission-critical workloads more securely

Whether you implement scale-up or scale-out infrastructure for your mission-critical workloads, nothing is more important than ensuring your systems and data are secure. Service Pack 3 incorporates all of the security patches and updates released for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 since its general availability in 2010. With additional certifications and security enhancements, Service Pack 3 is our most secure platform available today.

SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 has been evaluated by the industry's leading security authorities, and it is certified to handle the most sensitive information. In March 2013, several products based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 achieved Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level EAL4, augmented by ALC_FLR.3 (EAL4+). In April 2013, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 received U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 validation. Learn more.

Service Pack 3 is the first enterprise Linux distribution to integrate the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Secure Boot mechanism. UEFI Secure Boot offers a more secure boot process that is less vulnerable to malicious attacks by explicitly identifying the kernel modules that need to be executed at system start up. Learn about other security features.