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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