Embrace Linux Diversity: Simplified Multi-Distro Management

Amid changing market conditions and hyper-competitive landscapes, heterogeneity in your Linux estate isn’t just a reality; it’s a necessity.

Linux diversity enhances your IT infrastructure, maximizing choice and flexibility. Heterogeneous environments unlock the potential of your IT, allowing your team to select the right Linux distribution for each workload. This ensures business continuity and IT agility, so you can stay ahead of the curve.

However, managing multi-distro environments can quickly become complex. The challenge of technology sprawl, the lack of internal expertise and the risk of cost overruns can be daunting. When trusted distributions go end-of-life, like CentOS 7 did in June 2024, this further complicates the management of your diverse Linux estate.

In this article, learn how to:

• Keep running EOL distributions like CentOS in your infrastructure
• Simplify the management of multiple distributions
• Consolidate support for your entire IT infrastructure

Discover how SUSE can remove multi-distro complications and empower your enterprise with the agility and choice needed for navigating today’s competitive landscape.

Support for CentOS within Your Multi-Distro Environment

Running an unsupported, end-of-life distribution like CentOS presents significant challenges and risks within a heterogeneous Linux estate. Without updates, your enterprise systems are left unpatched and unprotected. This can cause security holes, compliance issues, performance problems and other risks.

On the other hand, migrating to a completely new system has its own challenges, including investment of significant time and effort.

With SUSE, you can overcome these challenges and protect your IT investments. SUSE Liberty Linux consolidates support for your entire Linux environment, including CentOS, RHEL and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) distributions. This unified support model not only simplifies management but also reduces costs and minimizes the complexity of dealing with multiple vendors. You get the flexibility to innovate at your own pace, with the support of a true partner focused on your needs.

SUSE Liberty Linux is specifically designed to support end-of-life distributions like CentOS, ensuring you receive the necessary security patches, maintenance updates and technical support to keep your systems secure and operational. As a no-migration CentOS alternative, SUSE Liberty Linux allows you to continue using your preferred Linux OS without the stress of an immediate migration away from CentOS.

By choosing SUSE Liberty Linux, you get the assurance that the end-of-life distributions in your estate remain secure and supported, freeing your team to focus on driving innovation and growth.

Learn more about SUSE Liberty Linux here: a lifeline for CentOS 7 users to future-proof and protect your investments.

Simplify Your Mixed IT Environments

The strategic use of mixed IT environments reduces costs, speeds up development and drives business growth. SUSE empowers you to optimize your IT investments, enabling innovation, agility and the freedom to choose the best technology for every use case. While SUSE makes Linux distributions, we also offer service and support across any Linux environment.

For over 20 years, SUSE has simplified multi-distro management with SUSE Manager. SUSE Manager supports over 16 different Linux distributions, providing full visibility of your Linux estate in a single pane of glass. SUSE Manager’s single console-based tool manages various Linux distributions, including CentOS alternatives like RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu and Debian.

Built to scale with your organization, SUSE Manager provides automated management, monitoring and reporting from a single location. Its automation and configuration management capabilities help avoid error-prone manual maintenance, ensuring a smooth and efficient IT operation.

By simplifying and securing your heterogeneous Linux environments, SUSE Manager helps you take your mixed IT strategy to the next level, empowering your choices now and in the future.

Support for Your Whole Infrastructure

Navigating the open source landscape requires a trusted partner with the expertise to support your multiple Linux environments. SUSE released the very first Linux distribution in 1992, and for over 30 years, we have been on the cutting edge of open source technologies.

SUSE Support and Services offer a deep bench of technical expertise, support and consulting services to transform your IT systems, ensuring they’re as agile and resilient as your enterprise.

Our world-class support team is trained to assist your entire mixed Linux estate — not just SUSE solutions. For extended white-glove support, SUSE offers the option of Premium Support Services, with a named premium engineer for your entire infrastructure, ensuring that you have the help you need when you need it.

Increased Efficiencies and Cost Savings

SUSE Support was crucial to the success of LOT Polish Airlines’ transition from Red Hat Enterprise Support to SUSE Liberty Linux. Hear directly from Marek Truszkowski, IT Systems Administrator at LOT: “We now have Polish-speaking L1 and L2 support in-country, which gives us additional assurance that we can keep our Linux-based systems in perfect condition at all times.”

In addition, LOT leveraged SUSE Manager to streamline management of its Linux estate, resulting in time savings and freeing up IT personnel to focus on value-add tasks. “It took just two weeks to deploy SUSE Manager, and we are now saving significant time and effort in patch management and reporting,” says Truszkowski.

Since implementing SUSE Liberty Linux, LOT has halved its subscription fees and gained the flexibility to run unlimited virtual instances of the OS. As the business grows — without needing to pay higher OS fees — LOT estimates that its total cost of ownership for Linux will be 30% lower. Discover LOT’s success story.

Expert guidance, optimized solutions and tailored support can lead to increased efficiencies and cost savings for your company. With the complexities of your heterogeneous estate simplified by SUSE, your team can focus on innovation.

Maximize Your Linux Choices

At SUSE, we champion heterogeneity and multi-distro environments as the default setting, and we’ve been doing so for three decades. SUSE empowers the strategic use of mixed IT environments, enabling innovation, agility and the freedom to choose the best technology for every use case.

With new EOL challenges impacting your mixed Linux infrastructure, we are committed to making choice happen. SUSE Liberty Linux is a stress-free CentOS replacement that ensures support and maintenance through 2028 so that your organization continues to thrive. Regain control over your Linux environments and minimize your dependency.

With SUSE, your future is secure, your operations are streamlined and your IT infrastructure is optimized for success.
Schedule a call to discuss simplifying your multi-distro environment with SUSE.