Enterprise

Red Hat, SAP Team on New Integrated Enterprise Linux Platform

Red Hat on Tuesday announced the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions, a new platform that combines two existing systems for analytics and data management into a single offering.

The new platform combines the existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Applications and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA into a single, consolidated platform.

Complex Challenges

“There is no single technology stack to solve every enterprise challenge, and big data analytics is no different,” said Jim Totten, vice president and general manager of the Platforms Business Unit at Red Hat. “Increasingly we are seeing IT organizations use multiple SAP solutions to tackle the complex challenges of their evolving markets.”

Built upon the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system, the platform adds a few new wrinkles, including Red Hat Insights, which offers proactive analytics and real-time intelligence. It allows customers to build and deploy cloud-based systems while providing warnings about potential technical problems and security threats.

Other technologies included in the new platform include Red Hat’s High Availability Add on, which isolates unresponsive applications; the Smart Management Add-0n, which helps to provision and patch large deployments of the software; and Update Service, which provides four years of extended support, including critical security updates and bug fixes.

The new platform is available through the Red Hat Customer Portal.

High Anticipation

Big data has been fueling innovation, said Mark Dendinger, CEO of 3V Solutions, a reseller of Red Hat software, but “large enterprises typically want to deploy multiple or layered technologies to address their specific data analysis and management needs.”

The new Red Hat platform definitely will “enhance the customer experience,” Dendinger told LinuxInsider.

The new platform marks the latest collaboration in a long relationship between SAP and Red Hat, which have worked as partners in the open source space for about 17 years, noted Lis Strenger, Red Hat product marketing manager, digital transformation.

“Both companies are committed to open source initiatives,” she told LinuxInsider. Red Hat’s open source OS, virtualization and Java middleware technologies provide a leading platform upon which to run SAP applications.

Customers of the two companies have begun to test the new platform, which will move into production shortly, Strenger said.

Customers migrating to SAP S/4HANA have been anticipating this new integrated platform, she added, as it “provides consistent infrastructure for both transactional and analytical workloads.”

Growing Demand

The new platform demonstrates the ”growing acceptance of open source alternatives,” said Jeffrey Kaplan, managing director at ThinkStrategies.

Open source “can enhance and extend the capabilities of traditional enterprise applications and tools, like those provided by SAP,” he told LinuxInsider.

The announcement from Red Hat and SAP came just one day after Red Hat announced an agreement with Microsoft to offer Microsoft SQL Server 2017 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

David Jones is a freelance writer based in Essex County, New Jersey. He has written for Reuters, Bloomberg, Crain's New York Business and The New York Times.

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