Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2000 11:34:22 +0000 From: "Caroline Larnach" <clarnach@fphcom.com> Subject: SuSE first to deliver Linux for IBM S/390 PRESS RELEASE 6 November 2000 SuSE is first company to deliver Linux for S/390 Today, SuSE Linux, the international technology leader and solution provider in Open Source operating system software, announced the general availability of SuSE Linux S/390. SuSE´s Linux distribution for the mainframe allows enterprises to scale Linux completely from PC clients to host systems. "We are glad to be the only company worldwide that can deliver a Linux distribution for IBM S/390 servers right now", explained Roland Dyroff, CEO of SuSE Linux AG. "SuSE Linux S/390 is the result of the unique partnership between SuSE and IBM. SuSE's technological leadership and expertise in combination with IBM's strength and reliability make SuSE Linux S/390 the operating system of choice in the enterprise server environment." With the general availability of SuSE Linux S/390, SuSE supports more IBM server platforms than any other commercially available Linux distribution. "It's great to have the SuSE Linux for S/390 distribution generally available and ready for our customers to put into production", said Nancy Roath, IBM Vice President Enterprise Server Brand Marketing. "SuSE's Linux for S/390 and our S/390 and zSeries servers together provide an industrial strength that's ready to support mission critical server applications." SuSE Linux S/390 supports IBM's G5 and G6 servers as well as the popular IBM Multiprise 3000. It can be installed in three ways: in a logical partition (LPAR), as a guest under the operating system VM (Virtual Machine) or within the Virtual Image Facility (VIF), which allows to implement several thousand independent Linux images on one machine. "We used the same code base for SuSE Linux S/390 as on our other platforms", explained Marcus Kraft, development manager for SuSE Linux S/390. "This quality attribute makes SuSE Linux unique." Software developers can now create applications on a PC and migrate them to very large systems - the Linux APIs are the same. "It was a major effort to ensure we have a real Linux distribution, not just some code that runs on S/390", said Kraft. SuSE has identified some typical scenarios for Linux on S/390: Most customers want to exploit the web serving capabilities first by running Apache and installing a firewall. The next step is the integration into the existing infrastructure, by leveraging IBM's connector facilities. IBMs connectors include acces to relational and non-relational data (DB2, VSAM, DL1), access to transactions (Cics) and to messaging systems (MQ). While most OS/390 customers have started Linux activities, SuSE also expects large interest from VSE customers that have been waiting for new S/390 functionality for quite some time. SuSE Linux S/390 includes more than 700 applications specifically tailored for the enterprise environment. Moreover SuSE Linux S/390 comes with a rich set of support and service options for any kind of enterprise needs, including installation planning, training, performance measurement and tuning. Further information on the product and how to place orders is available on http://s390.suse.de/en/ About SuSE: SuSE Linux AG is the international technology leader and solutions provider in Open Source operating system (OS) software. SuSE´s unique expertise in Linux and their largest development team worldwide dedicated to Open Source software has contributed to the recognition of SuSE as a leader in Linux solutions. SuSE offers the largest support database to the public, and owns the largest hardware database in the Linux market. Furthermore, SuSE supports more hardware platforms than any other commercially available Linux distribution. Designed for Web and enterprise server environments and efficient as a home and office platform, SuSE's distribution, surrounding features, effective configuration and intelligent design result in the most complete Linux solution available today. SuSE Linux AG, headquartered in Germany, and SuSE Inc., based in Oakland, CA, are privately held companies focused entirely on supporting the Linux community and Open Source development. With a workforce of over 500 people worldwide, SuSE has offices all over Europe, Latin America and in the US. SuSE contributes considerably to Linux development projects such as the Linux kernel, glibc, XFree86TM, KDE, ISDN4Linux, ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) and USB (Universal Serial Bus). For further information about SuSE: http://www.suse.co.uk or email: info@suse.co.uk For more information please contact: Rupert Warwick or CarolineLarnach T: 020 7436 4336 F: 202 7436 4224 E: rwarwick@fphcom.com or clarnach@fphcom.com Caroline Larnach Senior Account Executive Fox Parrack Hirsch Communications Tel: +44 (0) 20 7436 4336 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7436 4224 Email: clarnach@fphcom.com Website: www.fphcom.com