- German Linux provider SUSE renames some of its offerings.
- Puts ‘SUSE’ front and centre of new monikers.
- RHEL bug-for-bug alternative Liberty Linux now SUSE Multi Linux.
Multinational Linux provider SUSE has renamed several of its products in an attempt to get itself better recognised as a provider of useful software, especially outside Europe and the company’s native Germany.
The renamed SUSE Multi Linux Support is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) drop-in replacement, changed from Liberty Linux. Liberty Linux first came to prominence as an alternative to RHEL after Red Hat’s well-publicised licence changes that effectively shuttered CentOS as a free (as in cost-less) byte-for-byte RHEL replacement beloved of students, learners at all stages of their careers, and those running testing environments in RHEL shops. Shortly afterwards, Red Hat placed the source code to RHEL behind what’s in effect a licence paywall, only allowing licence-holders access to its source code, in contradiction with the terms in which it had been licensed.
SUSE was one of three companies behind the inception of Liberty Linux, along with database giant Oracle and CIQ, the latter the entity behind one of the first post CentOS clones, Rocky Linux. SUSE Multi Linux offers customers who are currently running RHEL the option of a different support company from Red Hat, a company that is becoming increasingly less popular among open-source and free software advocates.
Rancher, SUSE’s microservice management and development system gets a new name, to be known henceforth as SUSE Rancher, and the company’s virtualisation platform, Harvester, will now be known as SUSE Virtualization. Harvester was the first viable open-source hyperconvergence platform to the market in the wake of Nutanix and other big tech brands’ technology that abstracts compute, storage, and networking at data centre scales.
The americanisation (sic) of ‘virtualisation’ in SUSE Virtualization might be indicative of a dawning recognition by SUSE that, perhaps, it tends to take at least a third-place in US tech mindsets when Linux environments are discussed. Red Hat and, possibly, Canonical (makers of Ubuntu) or even Oracle, are arguably front-of-mind for most technology decision-makers in the US and in the tragically non-European United Kingdom.
In Germany, German-speaking Austria, Switzerland, as well as in other countries on the European mainland, SUSE is much better known. Many big-name brands choose the company’s offerings in the finance, engineering, and supply chain sectors, tending to be found in larger enterprises. Most notable recent convert to SUSE is the German investment vehicle, Deutsche Bank, which transitioned its servers from RHEL to SUSE Multi Linux Support earlier this year, when the offering was still known as Liberty Linux.
Longhorn, SUSE’s block storage platform is now – there is a theme developing here – SUSE Storage. Longhorn is typically found in SUSE Rancher container deployments.
Thankfully, the company is keeping its chameleon mascot (‘Geeko’) and the company’s re-branding stretches little further than name changes. In July this year, SUSE asked the community behind openSUSE to come up with a new name, as the company wanted to differentiate itself from its people-powered open-source variant, and its wildly useful Open Build Service and openQA.
Like Canonical and Red Hat, SUSE makes its money from support contracts and associated services for open-source software, charging annual licence fees for support for SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and its other offerings. The company also offers specific technologies for IIoT and edge environments, plus a Linux variant designed specifically for container-based environments.
At KubeCon North America, where the platforms’ name changes were announced, SUSE also launched SUSE AI, a “secure platform for deploying and running generative AI applications,” which offers organisations a choice of models, data oversight measures, and compliance playbooks. SUSE AI should help companies everywhere at least try and find something that AI can usefully do, thus ticking the box in the current boardroom buzzword bingo card.
